The screen object

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that psychic experiences of ‘dyslocation’, ‘dysembodiment’ and ‘psychic slippage’ can occur in relation to the object ‘on’ or ‘in’ the screen – ‘the screen object’ – in the context of working remotely using televideo technology with children in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This is explored in the context of a child’s experience when treatment started in person and then changed to remote working. The loss of the therapeutic setting and frame in mid-treatment can constitute a rupture and a trauma, experienced at a primitive level as the loss of ‘bounded space’ and of psychic orientation to the object. This experience may evoke psychotic or borderline-type anxieties associated with disembodiment, depersonalisation, derealisation or annihilation. Concepts from Linguistics of deixis, endophora and exophora – concerning orientation in place, time and person relative to context – are applied to the situation of remote working with televideo technology, to highlight tensions in this setting in the way emotional meaning and understanding are derived from the surrounding context. The screen as part of the setting/frame gives rise to ‘slippages’ of various kinds. In order to explore the theme of ‘the screen object’, the author draws on experimental psychology research on infant responses to televideo technology; psychological or psychiatric theories of disembodiment; and psychoanalytic theory related to the ‘body ego’ and ‘skin-ego’, the psychoanalytic setting, and remote or virtual psychoanalysis. It is speculated that elements of the psychic experience of ‘the screen object’ are likely to be present to some degree in all remote working using video technology, whether in response to a traumatic disruption to treatment in person as discussed in this article, or whether remote treatment is the agreed treatment from the beginning.

KEYWORDS:

• The screen object
• remote working
• de-materialised relationships
• disembodiment
• psychic slippage
• skin function of physical setting

Notes

1. Throughout this article, when I have used the prefix ‘dys’ deriving from the Greek, it is in order to indicate the meaning of ‘bad’, ‘difficult’, ‘abnormal’ or ‘impaired’, as opposed to ‘dis’ deriving from the Latin, which means ‘lack of’, ‘not’, ‘opposite’ or ‘away from’.

2. A phrase and motif from E.M. Forster’s (1924) novel A Passage to India.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham Shulman

Graham Shulman is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, Head of Child Psychotherapy in CAMHS, NHS Lanarkshire and Lead for the NHSL Infant Mental Health Service. He was previously Senior Tutor and is currently an External Tutor on the Clinical Training in Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in Scotland, and is leading on the design and delivery of Infant Mental Health and Infant Observation training to a range of professionals and agencies in Lanarkshire, including the recent development of a Lanarkshire Infant Mental Health Observational Indicator Set. He is a past joint Editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, a current Assistant Editor of the Infant Observation Journal, and is joint Editor of and a contributor to two books of collected essays, The Emotional Experience of Adoption: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (Routledge, 2008) and The Non-Linear Mind: Psychoanalysis of Complexity in Psychic Life (Karnac, 2016). He has published articles and chapters in journals and books on clinical themes, psychoanalysis, literature and chaos theory.