"Why are we so fascinated by beauty?" is a question many of us have asked ourselves, as have many who came before us. This book investigates the moment of ecstatic solitude in which everyone can experience emotions through films, works of art or natural phenomenon, when, even if for a "magic" instant, we feel "alive" and masters of our own Self. Expanding from the author's personal experience, this book is a series of applied psychoanalytic essays on film, literature, and aesthetic pleasure. It explores the complexity of loss and mourning, destructivity, perversion, and revenge, as well as an exploration of what can facilitate transformation and how to lead a blocked healing process back to motion. This fascinating and insightful book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers and students, and all those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the arts.

"Why are we so fascinated by beauty?" is a question many of us have asked ourselves, as have many who came before us. This book investigates the moment of ecstatic solitude in which everyone can experience emotions through films, works of art or natural phenomenon, when, even if for a "magic" instant, we feel "alive" and masters of our own Self. Expanding from the author's personal experience, this book is a series of applied psychoanalytic essays on film, literature, and aesthetic pleasure. It explores the complexity of loss and mourning, destructivity, perversion, and revenge, as well as an exploration of what can facilitate transformation and how to lead a blocked healing process back to motion. This fascinating and insightful book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers and students, and all those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the arts.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film brings together a group of psychoanalysts to explore, through film, the new forms of communication, mainly the internet, that enter more and more frequently into the affective lives of people, their intimacy and even the analytic room. The contributors, all practising psychoanalysts, analyse the potential and surprising transformations that human relationships, including psychoanalysis, are undergoing. At present, it is difficult to value the future importance and predict the possible disquieting consequences of the use and abuse of the new technologies; we run the risk of finding ourselves unprepared to face this revolutionary transformation in human connections and affects. Will it be possible in a near future that human beings prefer to fall in love with a machine gifted with a persuasive voice instead of a psychoanalyst 'in person'? The contributors explore the idea that virtual intimacy could begin to replace real life, in sentimental and psychoanalytic relationships. Imagination and fantasy may be strengthened and may ultimately prevail over the body, excluding it entirely. Can the voice of the analyst, sometimes transmitted only by telephone or computer, produce a good enough analytic process as if it were in-person, or will it help to foster a process of idealisation and progressive alienation from real life and connections with other human beings? The film Her (2013), alongside others, offers a wonderful script for discussing this matter, because of the deep and thoughtful examination of love and relationships in the contemporary world that it provides. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in the ongoing impact of technology on human relationships.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film brings together a group of psychoanalysts to explore, through film, the new forms of communication, mainly the internet, that enter more and more frequently into the affective lives of people, their intimacy and even the analytic room. The contributors, all practising psychoanalysts, analyse the potential and surprising transformations that human relationships, including psychoanalysis, are undergoing. At present, it is difficult to value the future importance and predict the possible disquieting consequences of the use and abuse of the new technologies; we run the risk of finding ourselves unprepared to face this revolutionary transformation in human connections and affects. Will it be possible in a near future that human beings prefer to fall in love with a machine gifted with a persuasive voice instead of a psychoanalyst 'in person'? The contributors explore the idea that virtual intimacy could begin to replace real life, in sentimental and psychoanalytic relationships. Imagination and fantasy may be strengthened and may ultimately prevail over the body, excluding it entirely. Can the voice of the analyst, sometimes transmitted only by telephone or computer, produce a good enough analytic process as if it were in-person, or will it help to foster a process of idealisation and progressive alienation from real life and connections with other human beings? The film Her (2013), alongside others, offers a wonderful script for discussing this matter, because of the deep and thoughtful examination of love and relationships in the contemporary world that it provides. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in the ongoing impact of technology on human relationships.