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“You may not be able to put the book down” (“Preface”, p. xi): Glen O. Gabbard correctly predicts in his enthusiastic preface to this engaging book. It is striking how much more this applies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced millions of people to stay home, and to reconsider their relationships to the digital devices that now are so critical to keep them in contact with others.
Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have been working remotely, and this volume of essays seems particularly topical as it anticipates many reflections, questions, and issues that have only expanded in recent months. Our current extreme situation has forced everyone to deal with relationships deprived of physical presence and the authors of the essays contained in this book consider with rigor and creativity varieties of engagement with technology, which have only become more relevant in a time when thinking through the role of technology in intimacy is a necessity, not an option.
Film—comparatively an old medium—has long been of interest to psychoanalysts and to writers from many different disciplines. The essays in this book focus on films which address the changes in human relations caused by the digital technological revolution and by the hybridization between man and machines. The film “Her” (2013) is the protagonist of ten of the thirteen chapters of this book, while the remaining three deal
with issues that are prominent in the film. “Her” aroused unusual interest in psychoanalysis, with analysts from different parts of the world independently presenting their work on the film at the 49th International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Boston in 2015. Written and directed by Spike Jonze, “Her” won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The protagonist is Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, a young man who writes love letters on commission, unable to tolerate the separation from his wife. To overcome loneliness, he purchases Samantha, an OS