On Distance Training

May 31, 2020. Nahaleh Moshtagh's tale of an heroic journey to receive psychoanalytic training despite geographical obstacles and organizational resistance, published in JAPA 68/2, was marred by serious misrepresentations of my work and a pair of counterproductive assumptions about distance training. I am writing to correct the record.

She holds my work up for dismissive ridicule by hurling the accusation that I consider the experience of distance candidates “unreal.” She writes that for me the “only experience that is ‘real’ and ‘unmediated’ … is what occurs between two physical bodies in the same room” (p. 244). While there are mainstream media theorists who make a claim of unreality based on their understanding of the underlying technological processes and resulting media artifacts (see Rushkoff 2019), I have never claimed that only in-person experiences are real. In fact, I have gone out of my way to argue the exact opposite. In one of the articles she cites, I write: “I want to state this as clearly as possible[:] a technologically mediated simulation of a traditional physically co-present relationship experience (i.e., a screen relation) is just as real, and can be just as powerful, as any other experience” (Essig 2015, p. 685). In the same article I write that “these new, mediated experiences of self and others are neither good nor bad, healthy nor unhealthy. They just are. They are our world. As a result, when a screen relation becomes…. the vehicle for therapy … our job includes attending to both the good and the bad, what is lost and what is gained” (p. 682). In another article I specifically argue that what's needed is a deep appreciation for the differences between the real experiences that can take place on screen and the real experiences that can take place in person (Russell and Essig 2019). Moshtagh actually makes a similar point about gains and losses when she uses the image of a “magic carpet ride” transporting her from Tehran to Chicago (gain) and t