Telephone Analysis

Warren Poland introduced the panel by posing a seemingly simple question: What is the place of the telephone, and what is its impact on analyses conducted by phone? Is the use of a telephone a variation of frame, or is its concomitant physical distance and absence of visual contact so crucial as to alter the essential analytic situation? Poland stressed the need to search for evidence instead of responding from theoretical preference, and noted that none of us is immune to a common occupational hazard: the bias that how one works as an analyst is good, while how others work is open to question. We have a tendency to feel moral condemnation toward those who threaten our accepted principles, and this occurs whenever anyone suggests a change in technique. To facilitate the work of the panel, Poland offered a working definition of analysis as a two-party therapeutic engagement based centrally on inquiry, in which the mind of the analyst is placed in the disciplined service of facilitating the expression, exposure, and exploration of the workings of the patient's mind. In that context, the exploration of underlying meanings and the power and effects of unconscious forces is what defines the work as psychoanalytic. He asked each of the panelists to give a brief description of his or her clinical experience with telephone analysis in order to promote a discussion; he suggested that those who feel that no true analytic work can be carried on by phone try to hear the views of those who feel otherwise, and that those who dismiss all arguments for discipline as old-fashioned orthodox rigidity try to hear the panelists' questions about the price of this change in technique.

Charles Hanly summarized his experience with K. He continued analysis by phone at her request when she left Toronto after a year of analysis on the couch, preceded by psychotherapy. Hanly was reluctant