Digital Psychoanalysis

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown, psychoanalysts suddenly were displaced from the sanctuary of their clinical consulting rooms. Those who wished to continue seeing patients --including many who previously had condemned virtual analysis--were compelled to adopt remote modes of treatment. Some analysts opted to continue treating patients through phone sessions. Others shifted to tele-psychoanalysis, and without warning, precedent, or training, relocated their practices to cyberspace. This course examines the rapid proliferation of digitized therapeutics in the wake of the pandemic, and the challenges this radical shift poses to the hallowed tradition of in-person analytic practice. It explores the performativity, relationality, and pathologies of the ‘digital self’ that emerges through lived experience in social media environments. Since these forms of self, relationship, and pathology shape analysts as well as patients, this course looks at their impact on digital therapeutic interaction and intersubjectivity. This course also looks at transference, countertransference, resistance and the unconscious, and at cross-racial and cross-cultural dynamics, in online treatments. Finally, the course considers whether tele-psychoanalysis, with its disembodiment, physical absence, and sensory constriction, is a mere simulacrum of in-person clinical encounters, or whether it broadens and enriches the analytic field. This course draws on pre- and post-COVID literatures on digital psychoanalysis, and on my current research on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis during the pandemic.