Catfishing, Perversion and our Multiple Selves: Danielle Knafo's avatar comes to town.

 Psychology of Catfishing, psychology of perversion, Danielle Knafo 

Recently, Danielle Knafo presented a paper at our local psychoanalytic institute on the topic of catfishing – and the oddest thing occurred.  I wondered whether I, when working as a psychoanalyst, am catfishing? 

First, though, what is catfishing?  Catfishing has gained prominence as a cultural phenomenon from a documentary movie and then an MTV series about people who present themselves as someone they are not in virtual space as a means of engaging through an avatar of some sort with other people.  A lot of this is good old scamming, where someone is trying to separate someone else from some or all of their money.

The term catfishing emerged when one of the members of the crew that produced the documentary was lured into a relationship with a women who was supposedly the aunt of a child prodigy.  The documentarian engaged in a long and deep relationship with her, thinking she was a 19 year old woman.  When he went from New York to Minnesota to meet her, he discovered that the aunt and the child prodigy never existed.  They were the creations of a 40 year old woman who was supposedly the mother of the nonexistent child…  Disorienting.

As the documentarian was trying to put together what was happening, the woman’s husband told the documentarian about a myth that involved a process of maintaining live cod in boats that were sent from Alaska, where the cod were caught, to Japan, where they would be sold.  Catfish were supposedly shipped with the cod to nip them in order to keep them fresh and energetic on the journey.  And this came to be the source of the new verb “catfishing”.

Dr. Knafo became interested in the phenomenon when she discovered that her patients were engaging in the process.  As she relates it, the patients were not interested in bilking other people out of money, but wanted to relate to them. 

Dr. Knafo pointed out that many of us, especially on dating websites, engage in a form of catfishing when we exaggerate or alter our profiles in order to attract others.  She cited research that 80% of us do this to some extent.  Men are more likely to exaggerate their height and the social value of their occupation, women are more likely to shave a few pounds and years off of their descriptions of themselves. In more extreme cases, people can borrow the picture of a more attractive person and post it as their own as a kind of “bait”.  She discovered that her patients were fishing for people they could connect with, but then, ironically, they couldn’t actually connect with them in person because, for instance, they didn’t look anything like the picture they posted of themselves to attract others.

The experience of interest to her and to us, then, was of talking with people who were desperate to connect, but felt that, in their present form – and we can think of this as physical, but it is certainly also psychological – they would not be attractive.  So they construct themselves in such a way that they are attractive.  And these ways include constructing themselves as idealized versions of themselves. 

The world of catfishing, then, becomes a laboratory to look at identity.  Who is it that I believe that I am?  Who is it that I would like to become?  What aspects of myself do I expect others to devalue (and therefore, on some level, devalue myself, while, perhaps also holding them in high esteem – I am white (or black or gay or straight or up or down) and I am proud, but also don’t feel that others will accept me for who it is that I am proud of being, but, because you won’t accept it, also a bit (or a lot) ashamed of being?)

And isn’t this, on some level, how we construct ourselves all the time?  Don’t I have an identity that I draw on when I am in a position of authority that is very different than the one that I draw on when I am having a beer with friends?  I experience myself as continuous between these two experiences, but if you asked me to take a personality test as the authority figure, I would score differently than when I am the buddy.  There would also be differences in how I would answer personality items as a parent versus a spouse and these would be somewhat different from how I would answer them as a teacher or as a therapist.  Knafo offered the analogy of the self being like a weather system rather than a rock (something Tom Waits would agree to...). 

Now the reasons for these shifts between roles are manifold, but catfishing encourages us to consider the ways in which they are determined by my desire to be “liked” by the other person.  There is a way in which I am trying to seduce the person that I am interacting with in each of these situations – to help them find, in me, the exemplar or an exemplar of who it is that they are looking for in that situation – the exemplary teacher, buddy, or therapist.

And we are suddenly very much in the midst of a rich psychoanalytic field.  Dr. Knafo’s previous work on perversion is directly relevant to this area.  She concluded that perversion, which ranges from the “normal” perversity that we all experience to quite harmful variants of it, is at root the result of the conflict between being loved – which is overwhelming – and being isolated – which is equally problematic.  So, by extension, I think we engage in “normal” catfishing on a regular basis – organizing ourselves to appear to be the person that the other person desires us to be in this moment.  The danger is that in doing that – becoming the exemplary analyst, analysand, husband, wife, or lover –  we are not being authentically ourselves with the person we are interacting with.

Perversion allows us to “love” an object rather than a person – or an aspect of a person rather than the whole person – so that we have a safe means of loving a manageable part of the whole person – so that we don’t become overwhelmed by the act of loving – of embracing in all of the richness and unpredictability – the totality of the other.  And if we only offer an aspect of our self to the other – if we are only the analyst in the interaction – or only the romantic hero – we protect the other from being overwhelmed, and ourselves from being rejected for the flawed aspects of ourselves that we would rather hide.

Succinctly put, Knafo’s take on the catfisher is that he or she is engaging in a variant of the “normal” behavior that we all, to different extents, engage in all the time.  As with all things psychological, when this “normal” behavior is extreme it causes damage – both to the fisher – who feels they have to hide – and to the fish – who is yearning to discover someone they can embrace.  In a world where an increasing number of marriages are between people who first meet in online dating sites, extreme catfishing is likely to become a verb that we all become more familiar with.

Btw, it is worth noting that, in what we hope are the waning stages of the pandemic, Dr. Knafo’s presentation was virtual.  Our usual protocol with out of town guests is to meet with them in our library.  It is a warm room, and about 35 or 40 people can fit into it.  It is where we hold all of our classes and it is particularly nice to mingle with the group – most all of whom know each other, some of us quite well. 

Unbeknownst to me – and I think to most of us in attendance – our virtual event was more widely advertised than usual.  In fact, it was nationally advertised to people in other institutes.  So, in addition to the usual suspects, the virtual room included people that were new to me.  And not only were they present, they dominated the early part of the after talk discussion – focusing on the catfishing aspect of the talk rather than the psychoanalytic content of it.  It felt more like being a member of the audience at an interactive daytime talk show – Oprah perhaps – than like an analytic meeting.  When a few members of our local institute tried to drag the conversation back along analytic lines, it felt to me like we were intruding on a “fun” conversation about catfishing.

Had we catfished them into a conversation by advertising it as a talk about catfishing?  Were they catfishing – acting as if they did not have analytic interests when in fact they had been brought to the party by their own institutes?  Or were they people who had heard about the talk in other ways and were merely there to hear about catfishing? 

In a case of life imitating art – or the parallel process that is deeply rooted in the ubiquitous phenomenon of transference - our discussion of avatars became enacted by all of the participants in the room.

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