Psychoanalysis, the Digital World, and the Pandemic: Frontiers and Challenges in Different Settings

ABSTRACT

The accessibility of the digital world and of remote analysis via Telehealth poses ever more cogent questions for psychoanalysis. One major frontier is undoubtedly characterized by the use of remote analysis (teleanalysis), especially in a time where the pandemic of the Coronavirus has caused a necessary increase of the use of this tool in our discipline, with a parallel increase of the issues concerning this area, where transformations, which initiate symbolic and representational activity, involve affective states that have not been represented and are therefore asymbolic inside the body. Some clinical illustrations will illustrate experience where the digital dimension becomes the core content of the session, that is to say during a remote analysis, thanks also to the specific use of all this material as a psychic and allusive derivative for which we construct the possibility of symbolisation and comprehension. What seems fundamental is the readiness of the analyst and the patient to accept every manifestation of the “remote” setting within the analytic elaboration of the couple at work, and the possibility of better understanding the psychoanalytic nature of teleanalysis and the stance to be adopted in relation to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalysis
• teleanalysis
• identity
• body
• pandemic
• virtual reality

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Andrea Marzi

Andrea Marzi, M.D., Ph.D., is an Italian psychoanalyst and ethicist, as well as a former Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Siena, and has been a member of multiple international psychoanalytic groups studying the problem of distance analysis. Dr. Marzi has held many positions in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, is a former member of the Editorial Board of the Italian journal Rivista di Psicoanalisi, and served as Editor of the 2013 monograph Psicoanalisi, identita, and internet (appearing in English in 2016 as Psychoanalysis, identity and the internet: Explorations into cyberspace). In this work, he conceptualizes the contributions that psychoanalysis can make to an understanding of internet use and its effects on the psyche.