I can hide if I want to: the function of the screen in zoom psychotherapy

This interdisciplinary paper explores seeing and being seen as mediated by screen psychotherapy. Although the connection between psyche and technology in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not new, it was further brought to light during the Covid-19 pandemic and the transition from physical encounters to Zoom and other online platforms. The paper focuses on how the mirror function is embedded in the actual communicative medium of Zoom virtual psychotherapy. It ventures into media and cinema studies to examine how the screen embodies a sense of being in the world. This technological tool, initially seeming so foreign to psychoanalytic thought, can offer a projective and transferential space, crucial to the interpersonal relational dialogue in which we see one another as subjects. Finally, we present a short clinical illustration to integrate the interdisciplinary dialogue. In this illustration we focus on the unique quality of Zoom psychotherapy, by which the ability to dismantle the components of the image (using only sound without video), represents the transference, a psychic retreat into darkness. This calls for a digital tele-reverie to reclaim the patient into an image dialectic relationship. This dyadic interaction via screen virtuality creates a space to explore “who is seeing” as well as experiences of “seeing and being seen.”