When my colleague asked me to write about the ‘ghost-post’ phenomenon, I thought he was referring to the ‘ghosting’ phenomenon in which people read messages online and decide not to respond, ‘leaving people on red,’ which can provoke ravage since it’s a maneuver used by dating apps and social media users to cut off ongoing relationships.

But I learned that ‘ghost-post’ is different: social media users post something and then archives their posts, sometimes to avoid the spread of their news and to revisit them later. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, it seems that users making use of ghost-posts follow a ‘fort-da’ logic. The ‘fort-da’ game was first observed by Freud when his grandson, having to deal with his mother’s absence, decided to play with objects by creating a movement of coming and going to soothe himself while the mother was away.

Lacan takes a different perspective: the dynamics of signifiers. Freud’s grandson uses his signifiers, placing words where he experiences the lack and articulating them to symbolize something: his mother’s absence, but also her movement of leaving and returning. Children get excited when playing hide-and-seek or peekaboo; the showing and hiding of objects demonstrate, ludically, how subjects experience lack when confronted with the object’s absence. Furthermore, these games allude to the barred Other, to this Other that is not omnipresent and is also immersed in language.

The ghost-post phenomenon appears to have something of this logic: in an era of the imperative ‘you must show’ from pornography to what people eat, posting something and then hiding it, before it becomes ‘viral’ seems to create a scansion in a not-all to be shown logic. Like the unconscious that opens and closes, these posts are shown but then hidden, eventually being revisited in the future.

For many internet users, their ghost-posts are not edited with Photoshop tools. They were not developed to show the phallic brightening side. On the contrary, they point out a subjective lack. In one example, the user went through a challenging time, feeling overwhelmed and lonely. She decided then to create images that captured this moment, images that she herself could revisit to remind her how tough it was.

Another aspect of this experience is how users avoid engaging in social media conversations about their ghost-posts. The ‘we’ aspect of social media often annihilates the ‘I’ of the singular experience. In regular social media posts, there is an immersion in a specular comparison, which usually provokes engagement in an online community that avoids differences. Everyone is in their own online bubble, like tribes. The ‘I’ is disguised to satisfy the ‘eye’ of the spectator, creating a bubbly resonance. Social media users usually praise the aspect of ‘all-alike’ instead of the ‘not-all’.

Nevertheless, in the ghost-post experience, it seems that the singular is valued – users reveal aspects of their subjective experiences as uncanny to others and even to themselves. My question to this new way to post is “in the bonfire of vanities that is social media, how this compartmentalization of posts in this ghost-post version can be a response to the subjective division when subjects are confronted with their lacks?”

• Lacan, J., “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 429.
• Lacan, J., “The Signification of the Phallus,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 575.
• Lacan, J., “Scince and Truth,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 726.
• Miller, J-A., “Did You Say Bizarre?,” Lacanian Ink, no. 15, Fall 1999, p. ?
• Leguil, C. “Je”, Une Traversée de Identités, (Paris: PUF, 2018).