February 2022:"The Body Vanishes? Preliminary thoughts on Bodily Experience and the Identity of the Analyst in Remote Analysis" with Andrea Marzi, MD, PhD, FIPA

The accessibility of the digital world and of remote analysis via Telehealth poses ever more cogent questions for psychoanalysis. Remote analysis provides an opportunity to study in a novel way the nature of the analyst’s identity, the ‘digital’ body, and the psychoanalytic relationship within the analytic field. To do this, Marzi suggests we must bear in mind that the analytic process is a dimension in which sensations and emotions infiltrate or invade the perceptual field and are welcomed in the space where the encounter takes place—the analytic field—to permit transformations which initiate symbolic and representational activity. These transformations involve affective states that have not been represented and are therefore asymbolic inside the body. It is a digital body that attracts countless non-metabolized elements incarcerated in this digital body itself, and which need to be signified by the working analytic couple. In this presentation Marzi provides some preliminary reflections on the fate of the body in the digital world of remote psychoanalysis. He describes the vicissitudes of the body in relation, above all, to the proto-mental system using clinical vignettes that illuminate his conceptual understanding. Marzi offers an open and reflective attitude concerning remote analysis and proposes that it is not destructive to previous psychoanalytic concepts, but rather enriches established theory.