GU4260: Digital Psychoanalysis | K. Seeley

English and Comparative Literature
Undergraduate and Graduate Seminar
Tu 10:10AM-12PM

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown, psychoanalysts suddenly were displaced from the sanctuary of their clinical consulting rooms. Those who wished to continue seeing patients --including many who previously had condemned virtual analysis--were compelled to adopt remote modes of treatment. Some analysts opted to continue treating patients through phone sessions. Others shifted to tele-psychoanalysis, and without warning, precedent, or training, relocated their practices to cyberspace. This course examines the rapid proliferation of digitized therapeutics in the wake of the pandemic, and the challenges this radical shift poses to the hallowed tradition of in-person analytic practice. It explores the performativity, relationality, and pathologies of the ‘digital self’ that emerges through lived experience in social media environments. Since these forms of self, relationship, and pathology shape analysts as well as patients, this course looks at their impact on digital therapeutic interaction and intersubjectivity. This course also looks at transference, countertransference, resistance and the unconscious, and at cross-racial and cross-cultural dynamics, in online treatments.

Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links. 

Please note: The Center does not administer the courses listed below and is not responsible for any changes in the content. For more information, please check the course directory or reach out directly to the instructor.