Finding Intimacy, the Unconscious, and Embodied Place in the ‘Limbo-space’ of Telepsychoanalysis

Like many psychoanalysts, since 2020 my sessions have been facilitated by some kind of telephone or video media. Unlike many psychoanalysts, I have remained using telepsychoanalysis as my primary medium for facilitating the work, using both telephone and video to mediate sessions. The observable reason for the change from in-person-mediated psychoanalysis to telepsychoanalysis was part of a collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has been, and continues to be, deadly and devastating. Fortunately, many of my patients and I had the privilege to work from home or some other place. I have remained utilizing this technological medium because this format continues to work for me and my patients, and I have been able to experience the multitude of profound ways the unconscious works through whichever medium is available to it.

While navigating and enduring the intensity of a pandemic, I grapple with how to live with integrity and accountability to environmental, social, and cultural transformations. I engage such questions in my clinical and personal life daily: How might we practice in such a way that addresses and dismantles white supremacy, climate catastrophe, the rise of fascism, wealth disparity, economic apartheid, and the anti-Blackness and anti-life of the carceral state? Can psychoanalysis support the queering, the world-building, and imagination that is required for creating new metaphors and resourcing new ways of living1?

Telepsychoanalysis is not an omnipotent cure for our catastrophes— in fact, the energy expenditure and mineral extractive practices used to power the Internet and devices are extensions of extractive colonialism, and devastate communities and climate— but telepsychoanalysis may be a way for us to keep talking and keep imagining while also shifting our relationship to our assumptions, including assumptions around movement, location, and what I call placefulness, or b