Telephone Analysis1

American, Argentinian, and British panelists presented the arguments for and against teleanalysis (a kind of remote analysis) and shared their experimental work in the practice and teaching of psychoanalysis using the telephone and Skype with video-camera. Audience members eagerly joined in a large group discussion to explore, challenge, argue against, and support the usefulness of teleanalysis in the practice and teaching of psychoanalysis. The panel held that psychoanalysis must adapt to the current social reality posed by the global economy and use its supporting information technology in order to consider the individual, exceptional needs of analysands in training who live in rural areas and in repressed cultures, as, for instance, Eastern Europe and China, executives who travel for work, and young adults who have grown up on technology. Technology enables psychoanalytic clinicians to relate to such analysands and to maintain the optimum frequency of analytic sessions for in-depth analytic work with analysands who are far from psychoanalytic centers. The panel objected to the claim that psychoanalysis is chasing after technology as an alternative to in-depth in-person work and that telephone analysis is not analysis. They asserted that psychoanalysts continue to value the study of the in-person analytic dyad but are adapting to cultural shifts by experimenting with the supplementary use of the telephone, videoconference, and Skype in their practice and teaching of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has been responding to cultural developments since Freud, and then, as now, this responsiveness opens up new pathways of understanding.

The main questions explored were: Can psychoanalysts whose work depends on the harmonics of human interaction work in depth with a person in a circumstance in which they are alone in an office with a communication tool? Can they develop an image of the internal world of the analysand without nonverbal cues? Can there be effective affective