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Everybody who has been in psychoanalysis (or psychoanalytic psychotherapy) knows something about the transformative power of projection. Patients do it, therapists do it. Projective identification, transference, screen memories, mirror stage, dream screen, etc. — back and forth; all the time.
Everybody who has been doing psychoanalysis also knows something about the healing power of revising one's vocabulary: finding new descriptions for past experiences, breathing new life into old words and concepts. Again, this is as true for the analyst as it for the so called patient. However, when it comes to projective processes therapists are, generally speaking, rather disinclined, if not averse to renovating their vocabulary; a vocabulary that is grounded in the discourse of mechanical reproduction, relying on the cinema as model to describe and explain psychic processes. It is precisely this 20ieth century cinematic orientation, I believe, that makes it difficult for the contemporary analyst to adjust their professional stance in a digital world replete with screens and projective environments that have moved far beyond the cinematic apparatus. Not surprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has left many therapists unprepared to relate to screens in nondefensive ways. Reports from the world of tele-therapy usually focus on loss, on what doesn't work and isn't possible. There's disappointment, overwhelm, frustration, resentment; there's anger at the screens we now work on a lot of the time. Screens are experienced as obstacles to be overcome, preempting ‘real’ connection and ‘real’ intimacy; the implicit assumption being that reality happens when the therapist has potentially first-hand access to the physical body of the patient.1 While most therapists seem to feel helpless in front of their screens, some have somewhat angrily disqualified screen-analysis as “a degraded sensory experience”, where corporeality is lost and voices are disembodied entities; as “relationship lite”, and