The Medium Inside: Psychoanalysts' Media Theory of Everyday Life

Abstract

In February and March 2021, as psychoanalysts and their patients shifted from consulting rooms and couches to Zoom invites, Doxy meetings, and calls taken in small private corners of the home or outdoors, many clinicians felt as if their entire playbook had evaporated into thin air. Traditionally, forms of distance treatment have been met with suspicion, seen as contaminative in their mediation or technologization of the therapeutic speech that has been fi gured as pure when in person.1 Distance treatment has often been derided as a lesser form of therapy because it robs the analyst of non-verbal clues as to the state of their patients while deritualizing or unframing the psychoanalytic encounter. Yet teletherapy during the COVID-19 pandemic was (and remains) a lifeline for the continuation of the practice in a time of crisis—and not for the fi rst time. From the London Blitz to a suicide epidemic in San Francisco, from the war for liberation in Algeria to the generation of new institutes where previously psychoanalysis was suppressed, teletherapy has served this function many times throughout the twentieth century. Suddenly, this supposedly denigrated shadow form of care became the dominant way patients and their analysts could continue their work. But this shock and demand to move to telewas partially so diffi cult for analysts because, while many of them had done the occasional phone session, very few had previously run full tele-clinics. Many analysts felt that they