The arrival of the pandemic, and the consequent lockdown, forced us to live at home, significantly reducing contact with the outside world. An experience that some have compared to a profoundly different phenomenon that has existed for some time and involves voluntarily self-excluded adolescents. The term used, and coined in the late 1980s in Japan by Saito Tamaki, is hikikomori. It is a form of generational distress that has also spread in Italy, which mainly involves young pre-adolescent males, adolescents and young adults. These children, progressively, abandon school, relationships, any investment and belonging context up to the extremely painful choice of retiring to their own home or even within the insurmountable walls of their own bedroom.
Hikikomori, the causes
The collapse of the infantile ideal in the face of the bodily, psychic and relational transformations brought about by adolescence starts the progressive process of withdrawal. Retreating from peer-populated environments is the only possible reaction in the face of an intolerable pain involving a deep narcissistic wound. The core of this suffering has to do with feeling inadequate, different, strange, unpresentable. The perceived risk is that of succumbing in comparison with other adolescents, all apparently equipped with what it takes to be brilliant and popular. The gaze of others becomes the element that most exposes to humiliation. The profoundly dramatic aspect of these events is the choice to commit suicide socially precisely at the moment in which one should be born socially.
To withdraw or not to eat: two sides of the same coin
In this sense, voluntary self-reclusion appears to be the male equivalent of female eating disorder. Both are constituted starting from a social system that in general rests its bases on individualism, the narcissistic hyper-investment of childhood, the drive for competition. In both cases the radical decision to disappear seems to be dictated by the conflict with cruel, particularly demanding ideals.
Virtual friends and real adults
In many cases, the retired young man tries to alleviate his suffering by resorting to one of the most pervasive environments of today’s reality: the internet. The virtual world allows you to keep others at tolerable distances, to stay in touch with reality and to forge relationships with peers otherwise unapproachable. The internet is not the cause of social withdrawal, on the contrary, it is often through a relational and evolutionary use of the network that the self-enclosed adolescent can continue his / her growth path in a protected area, intermediate between reality and narcissistic omnipotence. The work of taking charge of the retired adolescent requires the construction of a solid alliance between the different adult figures. Psychotherapist, parents and teachers must commit themselves to identifying alternative, creative school and relational proposals,
Matteo Lancini
Psychologist and psychotherapist. President of the “Minotauro” Foundation of Milan. Lecturer at the Department of Psychology of the Milano-Bicocca University. Author of numerous publications on adolescence, the most recent: Social withdrawal in adolescents. The loneliness of a hyper-connected generation (Raffaello Cortina, 2019). What our kids need. New teenagers explained to parents, teachers, adults. (Utet, 2020).
