The Digital Age on the Couch seeks to understand more about how new technologies interact with the prerogatives of an individual's internal world, how they may alter psychic structure itself in fundamental ways and the implications this may have for the individual's functioning and for the operation of society. This book attempts, from the perspective of a working clinician, to make some sense of this. The impact of mediation via technology and the consequent disintermediation of the body represent central themes throughout, as they impact on the experience of embodiment, on the 'work of desire' and on the way new media influences psychoanalytic practice.

Alessandra Lemma is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Consultant - Clinical Psychologist at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. She is Honorary Professor of Psychological Therapies at the School of Health and Human Sciences at Essex University and Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London where she is also the Clinical Director of the Psychological Interventions Research Centre. She is Visiting Professor, Istituto Winnicott, Sapienza University of Rome and 'Centro Winnicot', Rome. She is the Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series (Routledge) and one of the regional Editors for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She has published extensively on psychoanalysis, the body and trauma.

Introduction This Modern Life

Part 1: Outside In

Chapter 1 Imagined Embodiments, Lived Embodiments

Chapter 2 The Black Mirror: Becoming Sexual in the Digital Age

Chapter 3 The Disintermediation of Desire: From 3D(esire) to 2D(esire)

Part 2: Inside Out

Chapter 4 Mediated Psychotherapy

Chapter 5 Digital Transference and the Therapist's Anonymity

Conclusion