The Language of Tenderness and the Language of the Algorithm:
Ferenczi, Fanon, and the Confusion of Tongues in Digital Life<>
Wednesday, June 10, 7:00-8:30 PM ET
(will be recorded for registrants)
Mike Langlois, LICSW
Teaching Associate in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Ferenczi’s 1932 paper “Confusion Of Tongues” describes what happens when the adult’s language of passion overwhelms the child’s language of tenderness — the child, unable to protest, identifies with the aggressor and loses access to their own experience. Fanon described a parallel process in colonial subjectivity: the colonized person internalizes the colonizer’s language and is cut off from indigenous ways of knowing. Both thinkers insist that the solution was not to remove the child or the colonized subject from the encounter, but to change the conditions of the encounter itself — Ferenczi through radical honesty, Fanon through disalienation and the recovery of agency.
This webinar uses both frameworks to think about digital life without falling into the trap of casting technology as the aggressor. The confusion of tongues in the digital age is not between child and algorithm — it is between the child and the adults, institutions, and economic systems that deploy algorithms without adequate care. When a venture capitalist rushes an AI companion to market without safety testing, that is the language of passion imposed on tenderness. When a parent surveils a teen’s phone rather than tolerating the anxiety of not-knowing, that too is a confusion of tongues. But when a teenager uses a game to explore gender, or an isolated emerging adult uses an AI to bridge a gap in human infrastructure, or a young person of color uses a smartphone to document injustice — that is the technology functioning as transitional space, not as aggressor.
We’ll explore how clinicians can distinguish between moments when digital life represents a Ferenczian confusion of tongues — the overwhelming of a developing psyche by a system that does not have its interests at heart — and moments when it represents an act of liberation or play: creative, self-directed, and belonging to health. Case material from work with adolescents and emerging adults will illustrate both. The second half will focus on how Ferenczi’s insistence that the therapist own their failures, and Fanon’s insistence on the right to self-determination, can guide us away from the two most common clinical errors: pathologizing our patients’ digital lives, and ignoring the real structural harms embedded in the platforms they use.
Mike Langlois, LICSW is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he supervises interns and clinicians. He has served on the Massachusetts Commission for LGBTQ Youth. Mike serves as a resource on digital literacy & social justice issues such as dismantling racism, LGBTQIA awareness & safety, disability awareness, and non-traditional families. He has served in an advisory capacity to NASW on youth suicide prevention. Mike is a member of APsaA and APA’s Division 39 as well as the Board of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility.
Registration $40
Please Register in Advance at https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KwcC09CKQW6vm8PgqpUZJg
Paying It Forward
Candidates, trainees, & early career please contact directly for reduced rate options. If you have significant financial privilege, & you want to support early career therapists from a variety of racial & class backgrounds, you are welcome to fund a full or partial scholarship.
