Ontological security with different degrees of internet addiction disorder

The author's approach to internet addiction disorder as a technical way of being-in-the-world is fairly non-traditional for modern psychology. The use of schizoid way of being as its model, based on the phenomenological conception of ontological insecurity by British psychologist and psychiatrist R.D. Laing, is also innovative. In the first place, both of these ways are characterized by unembodiment of the mental self in the body. The detachment of a schizoid from his own body is similar to the detachment of a false self from the true mental self and is the result of his own actions. According to H.M. McLuhan, modern technologies turn people into discarnate spirits by giving everyone the opportunity of being on the air. Degrees of internet addiction differentiate in the extent to which the freedom of structuring of being-in-the-world in its many dimensions is sacrificed for more or less wide range of forms of unembodied virtual being. Split of the self, de-linkage from the world, destruction of hierarchy and borders of elements which compose the existence are common to both schizoidness and internet addiction and translate into existential insecurity. In order to confirm these theoretical theses we used the psychological construct which describes ontological security as a general feeling of existence with derived emotional experiences and two authorial diagnostic procedures descended from this construct. The first procedure was based on the principle of semantic differential and the second procedure was psychometric. The degree of internet addiction was measured by Chen Internet addiction Scale (CIAS). The comparison of characteristics of ontological security with different categories of Internet users (unaddicted, prone to addiction and actually addicted), demonstrated a decline in manifestations of ontological security, a growth of ontological insecurity (a false self) and also signs of irregularities of normative borders. Notably, the differences between confidence in the mental self and confidence in the body, indicating the deficit of embodiment, were identified only in the group of Internet addicted users.

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