Some time ago Elsa Godart – a renowned French psychoanalyst and philosopher – treated a young girl who had taken semi-naked pictures of herself that went viral. The girl was distraught (the pictures were intended for her boyfriend alone), the parents were distraught “and it all came down to this momentary lapse of consciousness,” the 37-year-old explains, “a moment so powerful that all critical thought was suspended – along with any common sense. I found that fascinating.”

Once Godart began to delve deeper into the apparently anodyne and playful world of ‘selfies’ – or “egoportraits” as they call them in Canada – she found repeated (and sometimes fatal) instances of these “critical black-outs.” Last year, more people were killed taking selfies than in shark attacks, for example (a number of those in the Philippines, the “selfie capital of the world”)…. read more here