Loneliness and Psychoanalysis

Loneliness and Psychoanalysis is the second event in our series of The English Association’s special interest group on Loneliness and Technology.

The isolation of the current climate has made the need for psychoanalysis greater than ever before, but it has also brought into view the uncertain place of psychoanalysis in theorising everyday life. It has opened up questions, in particular, of the metaphorical and literal space of psychoanalysis itself: what does it mean for psychoanalysis to take place in a virtual space online, how does treatment change when your patients, or indeed analyst, are on a screen, and what, to adopt the words of Jamieson Webster, is psychoanalysis’s role in the time of the plague? Is psychoanalysis not only a field that allows us to theorize loneliness but a practice that is, in some sense, fundamentally, lonely, and how might we all learn how to negotiate the dynamics of online living from psychoanalytic practice?

In this event Dr Jamieson Webster and Professor Josh Cohen will be discussing pandemic perspectives on Covid-19, the practice of psychoanalysis today and psychoanalysis as a way to think through our state of isolation.

Speaker bios

Professor Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He has written various articles and books on psychoanalysis, literature and philosophy, including The Private Life, Not Working and, most recently, How to Live. What to Do.

Dr Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011) and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013). She has written for ArtForum, The Guardian, Playgirl, Spike Art Quarterly, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York. She is a member of IPTAR and Das Unbehagen.

Loneliness and Technology

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them.

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them. It’s designed to initiate discussion around how we think about loneliness as a political history of emotion, how literature offers us a space to nurture solitude, and how technology induces and resists feelings of isolation.

The aim of the project is to investigate how a range of fields, as they struggle to adapt to the digital, depend on literary elements to convert feelings of isolation into more productive forms of solitude and loneliness. The intention is to provide a forum to think about the challenges to teaching and working online in the current climate, and literature’s role in providing us with the emotional skills to manage that adaptation.

It is designed as a cross-sector and interdisciplinary project that seeks to draw on expertise in the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, digital humanities, mental health, architecture and the history of work and education to bring together researchers and prompt discussion around how we relate to the digital and what it’s possible to do with thinking and feeling.

Anyone interested in joining the group or who’d like more information about it is invited to contact Dr Jess Cotton.