"You are now, infinitely more than you think, subjects of instruments that,
from the microscope right down to the radiotelevision,
are becoming the elements of your existence."1
Jacques Lacan, 1972
Neuroscience and paediatrics constantly warn us of the dangers to a child's development of being exposed to screens at an early age. For their part, nurseries request the signing of a document authorising the publication of photos of each child, a decision left to the parents. The image of the child today arouses as much fascination as it does fear.
Sitting, as she does every day, in front of the mobile phone screen, two-year-old Amelia performs her routines and antics for her 'virtual aunts', as her mother calls them. There, every milestone in her growing-up is exhibited: her first steps, her first words, or the moment when her mother decides, with great guilt, to give her a bottle instead of breastfeeding. A 2.0 version of The Truman Show.
This is a little girl who is unaware of the extent of the display to which her mother-owner subjects her, who has lost her right to her own image and for whom desire has been conditioned from her earliest years.2
Her mother, in an attempt to 'build a community', lays bare in front of her hundreds of followers the ups and downs of her journey through motherhood: from losing her patience and the arguments with the girl's father, to the hypotheses she elaborates about sex after birth. Within the account of a 'good enough' mother, the intimate takes the form of a display of how she takes care to stimulate her daughter every day to accomplish all the age-appropriate achievements. Is this the new form of care bearing the mark of a particularised interest, of which Lacan speaks?
The Other which does not exist seems to reveal itself in the form of an infinite eye that judges, compares or even congratulates a stranger's milestones. The comments multiply: mothers asking for recommendations for sleep coaches or language stimulators to match Amelia's achievements. As if that which is not written in nature—the knowledge that does not exist about being a mother, father or child—were promised by the Other of TikTok.
The child-object is presented as an ideal, and the screen functions as the third party between this child and her mother, though it does not separate them, but rather completes the circuit. In this 'cast of two', it is neither about the achievement nor the Other's approval ('well done!'), but rather about the camera capturing it; and it is there that Amelia directs her gaze – we might venture to say – towards the question of the Other's desire.
It is the social sphere that begins to replace what the family no longer produces, in an attempt to provide the subject with the fabric of her existence3; a fabric which, in Amelia's life, seems to turn the screen into the Other of the Other, in a mother-daughter relationship that in this way seeks to exist.
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. J.-A. Miller, transl. B. Fink, London/New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, p. 82.
[2] Fryd, A., Niño objeto ¿de quién? ¿de qué? [Child-object, of whom? of what?], Annual Study-Day, Pequeño Hans Department, October 2025.
[3] Lacan, J., Les non dupes errant: Seminar XXI, lesson of 19 March 1974. Unpublished.
