The Virtual Couch

This book is one of the first systematic examinations on the looming mental health crisis emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Bringing together practising therapists from Asia and Europe, this book:

• analyses themes like anxiety, depression, sexuality, loss and death through clinical vignettes
• highlights how children, adolescents and adults have been responding to the pandemic
• explores how personal and collective trauma are mourned, remembered, repeated and worked through
• studies deep-seated prejudices and fears
• focuses on how the pandemic has stimulated exceptional manifestations of human solidarity and creativity

Comprehensive and practical, this book will be an essential guide for mental health professionals, counsellors, therapists and medical doctors treating psychological trauma.

Sonali Jain is Associate Professor of English in Bharati College, University of Delhi. Her doctoral work at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) centred on Vijay Tendulkar and the semiotics of cinema. She was Translator-in-Residence at the University of East Anglia, UK, in 2008 and has translated Tendulkar’s play Baby into English. She has also edited Strindberg’s Miss Julie. She co-edited Literature, Language, and the Classroom: Essays for Promodini Varma, published by Routledge in 2021. Her areas of interest include psychoanalytic theory, film studies, drama and translation. She has been painting for many years, and her works have been exhibited in a number of group shows.