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I am sitting in traffic, listening to a podcast of author Gillian Isaacs Russell being interviewed about her new book, Screen Relations. She and the host are talking over Skype. Their voices come in clear, loud, and larger than life over my car speakers. Their words and ideas invite me, separated though I am by time and space, into a conversation the two of them are having remotely from one another. Suddenly, as if on cue, the audio goes fuzzy. Isaacs Russell's voice becomes robotic and distorted. They are having a problem with the Internet connection. When the connection clears, they both chuckle at the irony and resume talking. Just at this moment, my own phone pings. It's a text message from a patient. A crisis came up. Can we change her session to Facetime?
Such is the fascinating disembodied world we live in. Our technology is fast evolving the way we communicate with one another, consume information, even how we conduct therapy. And yet, as I discovered this year when I interviewed 27 psychoanalytic clinicians about their relationship to technology and use of it in clinical practice, it can be surprisingly difficult for clinicians to be reflective about the role that technology plays in clinical work (Trub & Magaldi, 2017).
Isaacs Russell arrives at a similar conclusion, in her wonderfully nuanced book about the strengths and limitations of screen-mediated treatments—the name she gives to the practice of using video-conferencing software to conduct psychoanalytic sessions at a distance. Her own fascination with screen-mediated treatment began after she left a flourishing practice in the United Kingdom and moved to rural South Dakota, where opportunities for conducting psychoanalysis are rather limited, at least in person. Initially she imagined using the time to write speculative science fiction. While doing research for her book, she got involved with training analysts in China, via Skype. Her interest in fiction began to blend with the new science-fiction-like