Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Increased worldwide mobility and easy access to technology means that the use of technological mediation for treatment is being adopted rapidly and uncritically by psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Despite claims of functional equivalence between mediated and co-present treatments, there is scant research evidence to advance these assertions. Can an effective therapeutic process occur without physical co-presence? What happens to screen-bound treatment when, as a patient said, there is no potential to "kiss or kick?" Our most intimate relationships, including that of analyst and patient, rely on a significant implicit non-verbal component carrying equal or possibly more weight than the explicit verbal component. How is this finely-nuanced interchange affected by technologically-mediated communication? This book draws on the fields of neuroscience, communication studies, infant observation, cognitive science and human/computer interaction to explore these questions. It finds common ground where these disparate disciplines intersect with psychoanalysis in their definitions of a sense of presence, upon which the sense of self and the experience of the other depends.
"One of the best Psychoanalysis books of all time" - BookAuthority"This book is not anti-technology; it is pro-psychoanalysis. Gillian Isaacs Russell comes up with a deeply humanistic, forward-looking book that does not deny the power of technology but insists that we use it to more thoroughly understand our human purposes. As an analyst or therapist, before you use Skype or FaceTime, read this. You'll better understand the new human terrain on which you work."–Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self