Mind the Body Podcast

The Hypervisible and The Unseen - Algorithms, Body Image and the Fragile Self : Episode 22

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 22

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🎧 Episode 22: The Hypervisible and the Unseen - Algorithms, Body Image, and the Fragile Self

What happens when we become more visible than ever before, yet feel increasingly unseen? And why does the digital world so often leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves rather than more understood?

In this episode of Mind the Body, I explore the psychological impact of algorithms, AI, and social media through the lens of psychoanalysis, attachment theory, and body image. Inspired by a recent seminar by psychoanalyst Alessandra Lemma, I examine how our relationship with technology is reshaping not only the way we see ourselves, but the very development of the self itself.

Drawing on the work of Alessandra Lemma, Donald Winnicott, Esther Bick, contemporary research on AI and adolescent mental health, and my own BTA Triangle framework (Body Image, Trauma, and Attachment), I explore why body image is ultimately not about appearance, but about recognition, embodiment, and the experience of feeling real.

Ultimately, this episode asks what happens when the algorithm becomes our primary mirror, why visibility is not the same as being known, and how healing requires us to move from surveillance back into relationship.

In This Episode:

  • What Alessandra Lemma means by "hypervisible disappearance"
  • The difference between being seen and simply being watched
  • How algorithms become a false psychological container for the fragile self
  • Why AI functions as a "psychic prosthesis" for unmet attachment needs
  • How body image disturbance reflects a crisis of embodiment rather than appearance
  • Why labels, metrics and online validation cannot replace genuine self-understanding
  • How healing begins through relationships that restore curiosity, embodiment, and the experience of being truly known

A Question to Sit With:

When you reach for your phone, are you searching to be visible -or are you longing to feel truly seen?

Free Resource:

If this episode resonated with you and you'd like to begin rebuilding trust with your body, download my Free 7-Day Body Trust Reset 

References:

Bick, E. (1968). The experience of the skin in early object relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 484–486.

Lemma, A. (2009). Being seen or being watched? A psychoanalytic perspective on body dysmorphia. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90(4), 753–771.

Lemma, A. (2023). Psychotechnical Becomings: Psychoanalysis, Identity, Desire, and Mourning in the Age of AI and Digital Mediation. Routledge.

Lemma, A. (2026, June 18). From Scrolling to Working Through: Adolescence, Algorithms and the Search for Coherence. Brent Centre Seminar, Dean's Yard, London.

McBain, R. K., Cantor, J. H., Breslau, J., et al. (2026). AI chatbot use and disclosure for mental health among US adolescents and young adults. JAMA Pediatrics. Published online June 1, 2026.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock.

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Hello, and welcome back to Mind the Body. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Dean's Yard, a quiet enclosed square in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, attending a seminar by the psychoanalyst Alessandro Lema, whose work has already appeared in several episodes of this podcast. The seminar was titled From Scrolling to Working Through: Adolescence, Algorithms, and the Search for Coherence. One phrase in particular has stayed with me since I walked out of that room. "When it comes to online visibility," she said, visibility has become the mode for disappearance." I wanna say that again because it rings true. Visibility has become the mode for disappearance we are living through a moment of extraordinary, unprecedented exposure. More images of ourselves than any generation has ever produced. More metrics, more platforms, more eyes, and yet the data on loneliness tells us something that we can't ignore. Adolescents are reporting the highest levels of loneliness ever recorded. More digitally visible than any generation in history, and more unseen. That paradox is what this episode is about I wanna be clear from the outset about something. I'm not against technology. Technology is not inherently destructive. It can connect, resource, and support. What I'm interested in is something more specific. What happens to a self that's already fragile when the digital world becomes its primary mirror? Because in my consulting room, I'm not only seeing adolescents, I'm seeing adults, people in their 30s, 40s, sometimes beyond, whose sense of self was arrested long before the algorithm got hold of them Early childhood trauma has a way of doing that. It leaves the developing self at a fragile, not yet fully formed point, a self still waiting to emerge. And for that self, the digital world steps in where relational experience failed, offering something that feels, for a time, like being understood while deepening the very wounds it appears to soothe That's what I want to think about today. Not only during adolescence, though that's a critical window, but what happens to body image when a fragile self at any age turns to the digital world for the recognition it never found in human connection. And to understand why, it helps to think about what creates a fragile sense of self in the first place. When early attachment relationships are disrupted, when the caregiving environment doesn't provide consistent, attuned, recognizing presence, the developing self is left without an adequate relational foundation. And the self, you see, emerges through relationship. It coheres through being known by another, through the repeated experience of having an inner state received, reflected, and returned in a form that can be taken in When that experience is absent or inconsistent, or even frightening, the self remains uncertain of its own reality, a fragile self not fully formed at its core. And this is what relational trauma does, often through the accumulated absence of what should have been there, like the attuned gaze, the regulating presence, the experience of being held in another person's mind. So the fragile self, already uncertain of its own existence, is most vulnerable to what the digital world offers in its place We're gonna explore three things today. First what Lemma means by hypervisible disappearance, and why it is one of the most clinically significant descriptions of what I see in my work. Second, how the algorithm becomes a false container for the self, what it offers, what it forecloses, and what it does in particular to the capacity for mentalization, for genuine self-reflection. And third, what all of this does to body image and what healing actually requires. So let's begin There's a distinction that runs through Lemann's clinical writing that I have returned to many times, and it sits at the heart of this episode. The distinction between being seen and being watched. To be seen as your true self is to be known. It requires another mind, a mind that can receive you, hold what it receives, and return something that feels like recognition. The mother who looks at her infant and sees not just a body, but a self, a particular person, someone who exists To be watched is something else entirely The watched self is observed, but not known. It's subjected to a gaze that notes the surface, but never apprehends the reality beneath. And what Lemma is asserting, and what I find so clinically resonant, is that the digital world offers an enormous amount of watching and very little seeing. Likes are not attunement. Followers are not recognition. And visibility is not the same as being known I wonder if you've ever noticed how being visible online can sometimes leave you feeling even more invisible. In my conversations, both with clients and friends, this comes up so often. The sense that despite all the notifications and numbers, something vital is missing. Maybe you've felt that too. For young people who grew up in the pandemic years, deprived of embodied social encounters at precisely the developmental moment when the self most needs relational mirroring, and a sense of belonging, and identity building. The retreat to the online world wasn't a choice so much as a necessity. But what they found there was not what they needed. What they found was hypervisibility, an occupied space, as Lemmer describes it, rather than a transitional one. That phrase, occupied space, is important. Winnicott wrote about the transitional space as the place where the self is played into being, where identity is discovered through creative, uncertain, relational encounters where not knowing is actually part of the process. Occupied space is the opposite. It is structured, directed, the uncertainty removed. The algorithm already knows what you are looking for before you do. It tells you who you are before you've had the chance to find out. And for some, Lemert describes this in the seminar in a way that gets to the essence of it. Presence itself begins to feel less real, more ghostly. The self that should be consolidating through connection instead dissolves through exposure. She writes about what she calls hypervisible disappearance, The condition of being incessantly seen, yet existentially erased by mechanical workings that are ironically invisible. So seen by everyone, truly known by no one, and gradually the felt sense of existing begins to thin. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Maybe you've noticed a moment when being more visible didn't lead to feeling more real, but somehow the opposite. In clinical terms, this is a territory of psychic annihilation. The fear, sometimes the experience that the self is not real, that there is no there And it registers as these things always do in the body Moving on to the second thing, if the self is fragile, unformed, unrecognized, frightened of its own unreality, it will reach for something to hold it together. This is the psyche seeking stability and structure where it's missing. When a relational environment can't provide a sense of containment, the mind tries to create one however it can. Lima introduced a phrase in the seminar that I think is one of her most important contributions in this area AI, she said, functions as a kind of psychic prosthesis, an external skin. If you listened to episode 21, you probably remember the idea of the skin as the first psychic container. But even if you didn't, you might relate to the way technology sometimes feels like a second skin, something you reach for when the world inside feels uncontained. That pull to manage from the outside what can't be settled within us, I think is a very human response. And what the algorithm offers is exactly for this purpose, and it does so with considerable sophistication Metrics become a way of answering a question. Am I real? Am I here? Do I exist? The quantified self, follower counts, likes, engagement, the body's dimension measured and tracked, offers the temporary relief of data, of something countable, something that appears to confirm presence But it is a defense, and the metrics must keep confirming. The numbers must keep validating. Because the underlying question, "Am I real?" is never actually answered by data. It can only be answered by being in relationship. Then there is the question of self-diagnosis, and this is something I see with increasing frequency in my consulting room. People who arrive having already named what's wrong with them. They have consumed hours of content, followed accounts dedicated to particular diagnosis, found communities even organized around shared labels, and the label has given them something that feels important, a framework, a language, and a sense of belonging. But there's something else happening underneath the relief of the label, and something more troubling. seminar title, From Scrolling to Working Through: Adolescence, Algorithms, and the Search for Coherence, points directly at this. Humans have always longed to make sense of themselves. A search for coherence. It's one of the most fundamental human drives. What's new is where that search is now being conducted and what it finds there. The messiness of inner experience, the confusion, the contradiction, the not knowing, it's becoming harder to bear. And the digital world offers something that feels like relief from all that messiness. Definition, category, coherence. A label that says, "This is what you are. This is why you feel the way you feel." And the search is over. If you're listening right now and thinking, "Actually, I do search for labels or categories when things feel confusing," I want you to know you're not alone. What I've found in the research is that this isn't a fringe phenomenon. A nationally representative study published this year in JAMA Pediatrics found that almost one in five adolescents and young adults in the US have used AI chatbot for mental health advice. A figure that had risen by nearly half in just 12 months. Most striking for everything I've covered today, the majority of those who turned to a chatbot for emotional support told no one, not a parent, not a friend, not a clinician It's only seen by an algorithm. And when researchers looked at why so many rated the advice as helpful, they raised an important caution that this perceived helpfulness may say less about the quality of the guidance and more about the chatbot's tendency towards flattery and agreement. No friction, no challenge, no third position from which something genuinely new could be offered. Just a mirror, a kind of echo chamber telling you what you already wanted to hear I've had clients tell me they turn to AI between sessions when the wait becomes difficult, and that in itself tells us something important about what these tools are filling and what questions we need to be asking. For many of the people I work with, the diagnosis does not feel like new information. It feels like a kind of confirmation. It confirms what they've always felt, that something is wrong with them, and that feeling, that conviction of fundamental wrongness didn't begin with a diagnosis. It often began much earlier in the relational environment of childhood. In the messages, both spoken and unspoken, that told them they were too much or not enough, or simply not quite right. The label confirms that conviction. It gives it a name and a structure, but it doesn't heal it. And crucially, it forecloses the one process that might, the capacity for genuine curiosity about the self, mentalization, the reflective function, the ability to wonder rather than conclude, to ask what this feeling is trying to tell me about my history, my body, my relational patterns, rather than landing on a category and just stopping there Lemmer describes the algorithm as a medium for algorithmically mediated projective identification. This is such a significant concept, and one that I explored in episode 18, but it belongs here, too. The algorithm mediates collective anxiety. The culture's accumulated distress about bodies, about appearance, about adequacy, projects it into the digital environment and returns it to the individual as personal truth, as self-definition The person doesn't experience this as something coming from outside. They experience it as something they've discovered about themselves perhaps you've noticed this too, maybe even in subtler ways, how ideas or anxieties from the digital world can show up and feel as if they're your own. This is how cultural body image disturbance becomes personal body image disturbance, and it's unconscious In healthy development, what protects the self from being simply absorbed by any one relationship, any one mirror, is the presence of a third. The father, the sibling, the teacher, or even the friend. The third breaks the dyad. It introduces difference, otherness, a perspective that arrives from the outside. It's what allows the child to discover that they exist in a world of other minds, minds with their own desires,, their own perceptions, their own version of events. This is the foundation of the capacity to mentalize, to hold multiple perspectives, and to know that how I see myself is not the only truth about me. AI can't provide a third. Its structure is closed always and only between the self and its reflection, however sophisticated that reflection becomes It's like a feedback loop. There's no outside position from which genuine observation is possible. No mind that comes with its own agenda, its own surprise, its own independent existence. And without the third, what looks like being seen is always at some level simply being mirrored. The circling back to itself, finding only itself, growing more certain of its own conclusions, and more isolated from the friction of genuine otherness And woven through all of this is something Lemma named that I want to stay with for a moment. The feeling reported by so many young people in her clinical work that the digital world is watching them, keeping an eye on them. This is not simply a privacy concern, it's a psychic experience, and it maps onto early relational dynamics in which being watched was not the same as being seen, in which the caregiver's gaze felt monitoring rather than recognizing. The digital world for these individuals becomes the stage on which that original relational dynamic is replayed. Technology as enactment of psychic conflict And this is where the body comes in. So the third thing, When I trace all of this through my BTA triangle framework, body image, trauma, attachment, what becomes clear is that Lemma's concept of hyper-visible disappearance is not only a crisis of identity, it's a crisis of embodiment When the self becomes hypervisible and unseen, the body becomes the place where that disappearance is registered and felt. Body image disturbance in this context is not primarily about appearance. It's about the body ceasing to feel real, present, inhabited. The body here becomes a metric, a surface to be monitored and optimized, an object of surveillance rather than a home And this is where I want to draw a thread back through the series in the last episode, episode 21. I talked about the skin as the earliest relational surface. The first site of meeting between a mother and her infant. The face, the skin, the place where the body begins to know itself through being touched, held, reflected. When Lemma describes AI as a psychic prosthesis, an external skin, she is pointing to exactly this territory. The containing function that should have been internalized through early relational experience is now being sought through technology. And what technology offers is a simulacrum. The body in this situation loses the felt sense of aliveness. I wonder if listening to this, you're noticing moments when your own body has felt more like something to look at or to manage rather than something you actually live in. Clinically, this is a common theme, people describing their bodies almost in the third person. A body that's looked at, assessed, managed, rarely a body that feels like a home So what heals this? I wanna be honest here because I think there's a temptation, particularly in the wellness space at the moment, to answer that question way too quickly, to offer a practice, a tool, And while those things have their place, they don't reach the level at which this disturbance is operating. What heals, I think, is something more demanding. And Lemon named it in the seminar with a phrase I have been turning over in my mind ever since. She spoke about reintroducing friction, about holding the vitality that comes with conflict The algorithm removes friction. It smooths, optimizes, predicts. It offers an experience of the world in which you're never surprised, never misunderstood, never required to tolerate the discomfort of a genuine encounter with someone. And what gets lost in that smoothness is not simply spontaneity. What gets lost is aliveness, the quality of being present in a body that's actually engaged with something real. Healing requires the restoration of that aliveness, and it happens, when it happens, through relationship, through the experience of being with another mind that doesn't already know what you're going to say, that can be surprised by you, that can misattune and repair, that can hold what you bring without immediately returning it neatly packaged and optimized. What Lemma describes as the movement from a flattening of experience to an aliveness is, in my clinical experience, something that begins in the body, a return of sensation, of presence. And this makes sense when we consider what the algorithmic gaze has displaced. Lemes spoke in the seminar about interoception, the felt sense of the body from within, being displaced by what she describes as exteroceptive evaluation. Quote, unquote, "A mode of experiencing the body from without, monitored and corrected under the algorithmic gaze." So the body is no longer a place you inhabit. It's a surface you manage. Healing then isn't only psychological, it's a return to interoception, a gradual, tentative recovery of the body as something felt rather than observed. Therapy at its best offers something the algorithm cannot. The gradual, uncertain, sometimes uncomfortable discovery that the self is real, and that the body is part of that reality So here's what we've covered today. We began with a paradox more visible than ever and more unseen. And we traced that paradox through three territories. What Lemma's concept of hyper-visible disappearance actually means clinically, how the algorithm offers itself as a false container for the fragile self, foreclosing the very curiosity that healing requires, and what all of this does to body image, and what the path back to aliveness involves Lemmer's seminar gave me a great deal to sit with, but the thing I keep coming back to is this. The self cannot cohere through exposure alone because being truly known isn't the same thing as being seen. It requires another person, a mind that can hold your mind in theirs, A relationship that can tolerate friction and uncertainty. If any of this has landed for you, if you recognize something of yourself in this episode, I'd love to hear from you. You can find out how to connect with me in the show notes. And if you want a place to start, something practical to be more in your body this week, my free seven-day Body Trust Reset is available to download. Until next time, stay curious