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Giuseppe Salerno: You were involved in online psychoanalysis before anyone else, so I feel lucky to have the opportunity to ask you a few questions on the subject, given the current period of forced isolation in which we have been living. First of all, do you think it is possible to carry out psychoanalysis via the Internet? If so, what are the theoretical premises of this possibility?
Paolo Migone: Psychoanalysis via the Internet is certainly possible, and the theoretical premises are the same as those underlying “normal” psychoanalysis, that is, psychoanalysis not involving the Internet. I have used quotation marks for the adjective “normal” to imply that it is a theoretical error to think that there is a normal psychoanalysis, which is in fact a myth (recalling the myth of the “classical technique,” which exists mostly in books). Psychoanalysis is a general theory that is applied to infinite clinical situations: different settings, different weekly frequencies, groups, couples, families, emergencies, brief therapies, severe diagnoses, and so forth. In each of these cases, psychoanalysis must be adapted to the situation and needs of individual patients, at least according to ego psychology, the important psychoanalytic school, which began as early as the 1930s and spread mainly in the USA in the middle of the twentieth century.
To make things clearer, I will give an example: if we, in order to remain “psychoanalysts,” will not modify our so-called “classical” technique with patients who need it to be modified or who cannot tolerate it, paradoxically we cease to be psychoanalysts, or rather we are bad psychoanalysts. The thought that psychoanalysis is just the one referred to as “classical” (outside the Internet, use of the couch, high weekly frequency, etc.) does not mean only impoverishing, but also misunderstanding it and showing a lack of comprehension of the theory of technique. It means using a stereotyped technique, learned in the wrong way. I will say more: t