‘Making the best of a bad job’: a literature review on digital psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children, adolescents and families at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the use of technology in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children and adults. The necessity to use Zoom, WhatsApp and the telephone was suddenly brought about for all of us with the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. In-person treatments, including those which were established and those which had just begun, had to be switched on to new means of communication. This paper looks at a number of writings, considering them in chronological order, to show the progression and evolution of thinking on this crucial topic.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19 pandemic
• digital technology and cyberspace
• disinhibition effect
• digital natives and digital immigrants
• cross-modal attunement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Translated by the authors.

2. Translated by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Pozzi Monzo

Maria Pozzi Monzo (PD), born in Italy, trained as a child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and adult psychotherapist at the BAP – now BPF. She has worked in Child and Adolescent Mental Services in England for over 30 years and privately. She has also worked for PIP; UK in Enfield, and for many years at the School of Infant Mental Health as a parent-infant psychotherapist. She is a training child and adolescent psychotherapist (Tavistock, BPF, Parent Infant Clinic, Italy and Switzerland) and lectures in England and abroad. She has published extensively and edited four books; the most recent ones are: The Buddha and the Baby and Neurodevelopmental Parent-Infant Psychotherapy and Mindfulness. She is married with no children. In 1999 she won the Third Annual International Frances Tustin Memorial Prize and Lectureship, with the paper “The Use of Observation in the Treatment of a Twelve-Year-Old Boy with Asperger's Syndrome”. [email protected]

Sara Micotti

Sara Micotti, PhD, is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, member of APPIA (Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Association, Turin), a couple and family psychoanalyst (PCF, Rome), member of EFPP, NPSA, WAIMH, and course lecturer in perinatal clinical psychology at the University School of Specialization in Brescia. She is also the Psychotherapy Research Director of the Centro Benedetta D’Intino Onlus in Milan.   She has authored and co-authored several books, chapters and academic articles and given lectures and case supervisions at international conferences and institutions. [email protected]; www.saramicotti.com