Welcome to PhD prison

Imprisonment is the deprivation of freedom. You are deprived of freedom when you cannot do what you want to do. If you cannot take a weekend off because you have to work, you are deprived of your freedom. When the reason for this is your PhD work, you are kindly welcomed to PhD prison, the place to be.

As a PhD student, you’re supposed to love the research you’re doing. You’re supposed to be absolutely enthusiastic about your literature, your participants and your stats. But guess what: That’s just one side of the coin. Once you’re involved in producing output, the whole process of accumulating your data and information can become somewhat of a hassle. Not only do you try to put together the required data, you’ll find yourself trying hard to make sense of it, to structure and organize it and to present it in a comprehensive fashion. In either of these stages, it can happen – indeed it may be inevitable – that you get stuck. Once you get stuck, there is little chance for you to break free even if it’s just for a tiny break because your conscientiousness won’t let you.

I fell victim to this tragic fate. Once I finished a literature review on cybersex addiction, I started off doing the same for online gaming addictions. Doing this reinforced me dwelling on my own addictions, CCC. Coffee, cake and cigarettes are the way to go when you need to digest 60 studies and put them into one coherent, concise and comprehensive piece of academic work within a week. And it makes you get through those busy Sundays, in which you’re desperate to fight the effects of last night’s entertainments while forcing your brain to work to its (semi-)fullest capacity. The fruits of this imprisonment are publications in peer-reviewed journals. Yeah, baby! This may be worth sacrificing a weekend. By the time of official publication I may be a doctor… That’s as scary as it can get.

In the end, PhD prison demarcates the victory of the super-ego over the Id. And I am as bold as to claim that the PhD’s super-ego is inevitably superior to his Id. I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt by mentioning that I phrased it the other way round initially – a Freudian slip?