The Virtual Couch: COVID-19 through a Psychoanalytic Lens

This book is one of the first systematic examinations on the looming mental health crisis emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic from a psychoanalytic perspective. Bringing together practising therapists from Asia and Europe, this book: analyses themes like anxiety, depression, sexuality, loss and death through clinical vignettes highlights how children, adolescents and adults have been responding to the pandemic explores how personal and collective trauma are mourned, remembered, repeated and worked through studies deep-seated prejudices and fears focuses on how the pandemic has stimulated exceptional manifestations of human solidarity and creativity Comprehensive and practical, this book will be an essential guide for mental health professionals, counsellors, therapists and medical doctors treating psychological trauma.

Table of Contents:
Foreword. Introduction 1. Play: Seeing Children’s Inner Worlds 2. Reflecting and Integrating the Inner Child During Challenging Times 3. Psychic Withdrawal to Dreaming: Gliding the Spectrum during Covid-19 4. Against Psychoanalytic Form: Witnessing the Unconscious with Lacan 5. A Smothered Community Dialogue during the Pandemic 6. Breaking down or breaking through? Varying shades and states of psychic lockdown and emergence of some movement within 7. Between Contact and Contagion: Sex, Shame and the Screen 8. Psychosocial Reflections on Destructiveness in the Youth 9. The Paradox of the Iranian Covid-19 Event: At Least We Are Not Alone 10. What does Therapy look like in Times of Lockdown? A View from Paris 11. The Waves of Loss 12. Living in the times of Pandemic: Remembering and Reliving Loss and Trauma 13. Stairs and Waves: On the Shores of ‘Social’ Distancing 14. Unmasked: The Dread of being Able to Kill 15. Where are Your Brains?

About the Author :
Sonali Jain is Associate Professor of English in Bharati College, University of Delhi. Her doctoral work at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) centred on Vijay Tendulkar and the semiotics of cinema. She was Translator-in-Residence at the University of East Anglia, UK, in 2008 and has translated Tendulkar’s play Baby into English. She has also edited Strindberg’s Miss Julie. She co-edited Literature, Language, and the Classroom: Essays for Promodini Varma, published by Routledge in 2021. Her areas of interest include psychoanalytic theory, film studies, drama and translation. She has been painting for many years, and her works have been exhibited in a number of group shows.