Remote Working during the Pandemic: A Second Q&A with Gillian Isaacs Russell

On the first anniversary of the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, Gillian Isaacs Russell, author of the influential Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, returns to respond to a second set of questions from the BJP. In this interview by email, she considers the challenges and issues that came up for clinicians and patients during the last year of working remotely. Looking back at the year as a whole, she explores the impact of ongoing trauma on the therapeutic couple. She discusses the creative ways that clinicians have found to navigate the losses and differences between co-present and distance treatment, including holding an internal paradox of immersion in telepresence and the maintenance of a reflective distance, to be shared and explored with the patient. She examines the effects that differing hardware such as telephone or computer screen have on our intimate communication, how the intrusion of the personal environments of both clinician and patient may have affected the dynamics of the therapeutic couple, and the personal and global experience of loss and bereavement for both therapist and patient, particularly when it has to be processed remotely. Finally, the BJP asks her to give her thoughts on the future and whether the 'new normal' will include more hybrid forms of training and treatment.