ABSTRACT
The year of the pandemic and its various lockdowns (2020) saw a historical moment in the history of cinema, namely, the closure of all cinemas. With the collapse of the “big screen”, the small screen was raised to a new unprecedented functionality. The shift from big screen to small screen use – laptops, iPhones, television etc. – indexed a correlative challenge at the level of the social bond, and the manner in which human beings worked, learned, played, consumed, and suffered. One consequence of the restrictions upon social movements, and the reliance upon the use of the small screen was the adaptation of the practice of psychoanalysis with clients and patients opting to continue their treatments, remotely. As a corollary to this shift, psychoanalytic discourse itself became confined to the small screen with conferences, workshops and teaching seminars being conducted on Zoom and other such applications. Exploring the ‘shift in screens’ and the implications for human desire and psychoanalytic practice was the theme of the 12th annual Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival conducted on Zoom during April 2021. The papers presented at that event provided the context to the chapters in this volume. This chapter outlines the parameters of these psychoanalytic concerns while commenting on the sociocultural context within which they surface. It also includes the outline and order of chapters as they appear in the volume.
