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‘Screens display some of the thorniest, most complex set[s] of confusing questions I have encountered in a psychoanalytic career that has been connected to technology from the very beginning’. Thus writes Todd Essig, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst from the William Alanson White Institute, New York, in the Foreword. Essig was an enthusiastic ‘adopter’ of the new technologies from the 1980s onwards. Having ‘charged online’ in the 1980s and set up The Psychoanalytic Connection in , Essig then started to experience a growing ‘dystopian funk’. As most clinicians would recognize, books and screens are ‘wonderful Cartesian devices’; and yet, whilst they let us know what someone is thinking at a distance, we still wonder whether a Cartesian device is adequate, or to put it in Winnicottian terms (which Isaacs Russell so brilliantly does throughout this important book) good enough for our purposes. Whether or not there is ‘functional equivalence’, between co-present and mediated treatments, is a live and highly contentious issue, and Screen Relations comprehensively addresses so many of the issues involved recruiting not only psychoanalytic views but also input from the realms of neuroscience, information technology and cyberpsychology. Isaacs Russell is no Luddite and her examination of the issues surrounding screen relations is deep and deeply needed by all clinicians and others who operate through screen media.
She is a therapist who trained in the UK and moved to the USA and has a wealth of experience of remote clinical work, and a keen understanding of analytic therapy from Freud, Winnicott, Klein, Bion, Ogden and others. The questions motivating her text are those we should all ask ourselves before embarking on mediated work. They are: can an effective treatment proceed without physical presence? What happens in mediated treatment when there is no potential to ‘kiss or kick’? How is intimacy affected by altering the balance between implicit and explicit communica