Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen: The Year the Cinemas Closed (The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis Series)

Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen examines the impact of cinema closures and the shift to small-screen consumption on our aesthetic and subjective desires during the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective.

The chapters in this text hold a unique focus on the intersections of film, psychoanalysis, and the subjective implications of the shift from cinema to the small screen of domestic space. The subjects span historical and current Lacanian thinking, including the representation of psychoanalysis as artifice, Lacan appearing on television, the travails and tribulations of computer mediated analysis, the traumatrope, and the techno-inflected imagined social bond of what Jacques Lacan called the ‘alethosphere’. In this collection, the socio-cultural narratives and Real disruptions of the pandemic are framed as a function of the paradoxes of enjoyment characteristic of Lacanian psychoanalysis rather than merely the psychosocial repercussions of a planetary and contingent disaster.

With contributions from practicing psychoanalysts, as well as academics working in related interdisciplinary areas, Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen will have appeal to readers of contemporary Lacanian work in general, to readers and researchers of contemporary psychoanalytic studies, and transdisciplinary and intersectional scholars engaged in psychoanalytic, cultural, and psycho-social research.

Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic scholar in Dublin, Ireland. She is the founder of the Dublin Lacan study group, co-organiser of the Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival, and has published widely on the theory and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is series editor for Routledge’s Studying Lacan’s Seminars series. Her most recent book is Psychoanalysing Ambivalence: On and Off the Couch with Freud and Lacan (with Stephanie Swales, Routledge, 2020).

Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan is an independent scholar within the fields of Lacanian psychoanalysis, body/disability, drama, and sexuality studies. Her PhD was an interdisciplinary study of the trauma of the body in the drama of Artaud, Beckett and Genet within a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. She has published psychoanalytic articles on themes such as disability, sexuality, the phallus, and the intersections of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. She is co-organiser of the Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival.