Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen examines the impact of cinema closures and the shift to small-screen consumption on our aesthetic and subjective desires during the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective. The chapters in this text hold a unique focus on the intersections of film, psychoanalysis, and the subjective implications of the shift from cinema to the small screen of domestic space. The subjects span historical and current Lacanian thinking, including the representation of psychoanalysis as artifice, Lacan appearing on television, the travails and tribulations of computer mediated analysis, the traumatrope, and the techno-inflected imagined social bond of what Jacques Lacan called the ‘alethosphere’. In this collection, the socio-cultural narratives and Real disruptions of the pandemic are framed as a function of the paradoxes of enjoyment characteristic of Lacanian psychoanalysis rather than merely the psychosocial repercussions of a planetary and contingent disaster. With contributions from practicing psychoanalysts, as well as academics working in related interdisciplinary areas, Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen will have appeal to readers of contemporary Lacanian work in general, to readers and researchers of contemporary psychoanalytic studies, and transdisciplinary and intersectional scholars engaged in psychoanalytic, cultural, and psycho-social research.

Table of Contents:
Series Preface – Ian Parker Introduction - Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan and Carol Owens (In)Continent Topology of Pandemics, Screens, and Scripts Don Kunze Digital Tectonics and Cinematic Intimacy: An Epidemiological/Psychoanalytic Perspective Robert Kilroy At the Mercy of the Screen: Passivity and its Vicissitudes in a Time of Crisis Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan Undine: Siren Screens Jessica Datema and Manya Steinkoler Prohibition and Power: Normal People as Pandemic Pornography Erica Galioto Weeping on and off Screen – Truth, Falsity, and Art Miles Link "The Thing did not Dissatisfy me?" Lacanian Perspectives on Transference and AI-Driven Psychotherapeutic Chatbots Mike Holohan The rise of the lathouses: Some consequences for the speaking being and the social bond Hilda Fernandez-Alvarez Lacan on the Telly: Psychoanalysis on the Small Screen(s) Carol Owens and Eve Watson Power and Politics in Adam Curtis’ ‘Can’t Get you out of my Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World’: A Discussion Isabel Millar, Brett Nicholls, Rosemary Overell, Daniel Tutt Afterword - Olga Cox Cameron