‘…psychoanalysis would not have been what it was (any more than so many other things) if E-mail, for example, had existed. And in the future it will no longer be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated, from the moment E-mail, for example, became possible.’
— Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995)

‘When can a screen relation substitute for the experience of being bodies together? When can it not?’
— Tod Essig, Foreword to Gillian Isaacs Russell, Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (2015)

Can you ‘do psychoanalysis’ by telephone, Skype, email? As Russell points out in her recent Screen Relations, the questions – fuelled by what she describes as ‘enchantment with technology, fear of professional obsolescence, and economic anxiety’ – are now urgent for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Questions of environment, contact, silence, connection, reliability, presence, access, embodiment, equality and diversity, professional survival … the list could go on.  Continue reading →