Comparison of In-Person and Screen-Based Analysis Using Communication Models: A First Step Toward the Psychoanalysis of Telecommunications and Its Noise

Abstract

As the popularity of computer-mediated psychoanalysis rises, it is important that analysts and researchers undertake a more comprehensive investigation of the parameters involved in mediation and their effects on the psychoanalytic setting, the analytic field, and the unconscious of the analytic couple. The primary aim of this paper is to offer a series of communication models that visually lay out for comparison purposes key aspects involved in both in-person and mediated psychoanalytic communication. Particular emphasis is placed on the nonverbal channels of unconscious communication, so vital to reverie, and on the attenuation and distortion of these channels when electronically mediated. Also addressed are the disruptive capacities of communication devices and the mediation artifacts that are inevitably introduced by telecommunication systems, whose overarching goals of efficiency, clarity, and expediency conflict with those of analysis. The paper ends with a call for the psychoanalysis of telecommunications.

Keywords:

• analytic field
• communication model
• noise
• online psychoanalysis
• psychoanalytic frame

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Todd Essig and Gillian Isaacs Russell for their many helpful editorial suggestions and their generous discussions and support.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sheryl Brahnam

Sheryl Brahnam, PhD, is Professor and Daisy Portenier Loukes Research Fellow in the Computer Information Systems Department in the School of Business at Missouri State University and a candidate at the Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute.