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Published online: 15 November 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
The Covid-19 pandemic seems strangely absent present. In a sense, the intense period of lockdowns, spiralling death figures, infections, restrictions and unprecedented psychosocial change in many parts of the world seems behind us and long gone. Even though the pandemic began at some point in December 2019 and the WHO officially ended its designation as a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ in May 2023, it seems to have been overshadowed recently by the war in Ukraine, a new level of escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict and other global events. The ‘new normal’ is yesterday’s news. Yet, it has left a lasting legacy on many aspects of life we have learnt, or not learnt, to live with. Above all, at its height, Covid-19 changed human relationships and psychodynamics. As people stayed at home and face-to-face life seemingly stood still, they turned to screens and were then truly ‘together alone’, as Sherry Turkle (2021) put it in an article for Time magazine, flipping her famous diagnosis of our technologically-saturated lives. As events, talks, weddings and even funerals moved online and were streamed via software such as Zoom, the internet offered many a sense of feeling connected yet also alienated, alone, vulnerable or anxious of what was to come.
Carol Owens and Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan, the organisers of the annual Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival in Dublin, faced similar challenges as they moved the festival entirely online in 2021. Their edited book Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen: The Year the Cinemas Closed (2024) brings together some of the papers from the festival as well as additional ones to interrogate the relationship between psychoanalysis and different screens. It is a comprehensive collection of fascinating chapters that analyse what seemed like a shift to, or perhaps pull into, virtuality. The
Jacob Johanssen
Jacob Johanssen