Dystopia Now? A Review Essay on Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Accounts of the Pandemic and Beyond: After Lockdown, Opening Up: Psychosocial Transformation in the Wake of COVID-19 Darren Ellis and Angie Veola (Editors),  Palgrave Macmillan, 2021,  322 pp., £109.99, hardback, ISBN: 978-3-030-80277-6 Through a Screen Darkly: Psychoanalytic Reflections During the Pandemic Ahron Friedberg M.D., with Sandra Sherman,  Routledge, 2021,  198 pp., £130.00, hardback, ISBN: 9780367771515 Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life: Common Distress, Individual Experience Howard B. Levine and Ana de Staal (Editors),  Phoenix Publishing House, 2021,  288 pp., $35.95, paperback, ISBN: 978-1912691777

Published online: 5 April 2023

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023

Before I had any real sense of what it was, psychoanalysis exuded a mysterious magnetism for me. It was the aisle in the bookshop that gave out a certain

charge—there was something of intense interest in that physical environment. Stepping for the first time into the room where I would go on to spend many hours, over many years, on the couch, held a similar magic—the sepia photos of Freud on the mantlepiece, a couch straight out of Maresfield Gardens—undoubtably a place of dreams. The analysis that followed was always conducted with a theatrical flourish—with a deep faith in the formal conventions of the practice—the aesthetics of the setting paid reverence to the aesthetics of the thought.

The transition to Zoom—the mourning of embodied clinical contact—is a major preoccupation for many of the authors and contributors to a flurry of recent publications concerned with the global pandemic’s impact on psychoanalytic practice. While many analysts in these collections bemoan ‘the loss of emotional closeness’ that was a supposed consequence of the shift online, it was the vanishing of the curated world that I missed most. The stylised greeting, the pictures, the books, the rugs, ornaments and couch—to me, these are the signifiers of psychoanalysis—they alert the subject to the fact that they are in a different kind of place, a different mode of time. It seems I am a sucker for what Ana de Staal names ‘psychoanalytic kitsch’ in her contribution to Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life, but is an attachment to the staging of the work any more imaginary than the idea of emotional closeness?

I think of analysis as a setting where you meet yourself rather than the person of the analyst—it is the refusal of empathetic relating that means something new can emerge. An embodied presence as witne