The Virtual Couch COVID-19 through a Psychoanalytic Lens

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.

Foreword by Sudhir Kakar Introduction Sonali Jain 1. Play: Seeing Children’s Inner Worlds Nupur Dhingra Paiva and Shweta Dharamdasani 2. Reflecting and Integrating the Inner Child During Challenging Times Rekha Sapra 3. Psychic Withdrawal to Dreaming: Gliding the Spectrum during Covid-19 Neetu Sarin 4. Against Psychoanalytic Form: Witnessing the Unconscious with Lacan Ahmad Fuad Rahmat 5. A Smothered Community Dialogue during the Pandemic Jhuma Basak 6. Breaking down or breaking through? Varying shades and states of psychic lockdown and emergence of some movement within Namita Bhutani 7. Between Contact and Contagion: Sex, Shame and the Screen Rashi Kapoor 8. Psychosocial Reflections on Destructiveness in the Youth Ashis Roy 9. The Paradox of the Iranian Covid-19 Event: At Least We Are Not Alone Gohar Homayounpour 10. What does Therapy look like in Times of Lockdown? A View from Paris Anne Gagnant and Benjamin Levy 11. The Waves of Loss Surabhika Maheshwari 12. Living in the times of Pandemic: Remembering and Reliving Loss and Trauma Shweta Dharamdasani 13. Stairs and Waves: On the Shores of ‘Social’ Distancing Ananya Kushwaha 14. Unmasked: The Dread of being Able to Kill Urvashi Pawar 15. Where are Your Brains? Anurag Mishra, Bhaskar Mukherjee and Anup Dhar

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.