From the Editors

It is with a mix of delight and sadness that we present the final essay in our series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. We greatly appreciate the depth and range of reviews that our guest editors, Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris, have brought to this project. Taken together, our reviewers' reactions show how Winnicott's ideas continue to guide and inform contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Though we are sorry to see the project conclude, we are pleased to close it with a thoughtful essay by Lesley Caldwell, co-editor of the Collected Works. We are indeed grateful to Blumberg and Harris for the care with which they have overseen this exceptional project over several years.

In a book essay on virtuality, Aden Evens brings into conversation two distinctly different volumes—Hannah Zeavin's The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy and Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs's Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. Evens, an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth, brings to his work on media, the digital, and philosophy a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis that equips him to view the digital world through an analytic lens. The two books reviewed in this essay each grapple—as impartially as possible, and from varied angles—with the impact on self and other of an increasingly digital world. Fortuitously (given our recent focus on Winnicott)—as Evens notes—each work draws on Winnicott's thinking: Zeavin invokes the Winnicott whose radio addresses “appeal[ed] to the masses of forlorn mothers whose male partners [were] off fighting in World War II,” thereby beginning to “pave the way for call-in shows that dispense advice, entertainment, and wisdom for life”; and for Frankel and Krebs, Evens observes, the Winnicott whose “image of the infant as omnipotent, experiencing no difference between desire and fulfillment, provides an opportunity … to stake out a place for the virtual in the infant