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I am grateful to the Editors for inviting me to respond to Dr Zapien’s illuminating research investigating analysts’ and candidates’ experience of “teleanalysis” during the COVID pandemic. This research makes an important contribution to the growing analytic literature on teleanalysis, which is the umbrella term used by Dr Zapien to capture the use of “purely teleanalytic treatments, hybrid treatments, and shuttle treatments”. Dr Zapien’s research not only provides interesting insights into the experience of working “in the tents” during the pandemic, to use Bolognini’s (2020) apt turn of phrase, but also affords us an opportunity to reflect on the gains and losses of continuing to practise teleanalysis now that the pandemic is no longer the force majeure driving the shift to a teleanalytic setting.
Faithful to the phenomenological method Dr Zapien opts for in this research, she offers us an unsaturated account of the experience of her participants without imposing a theoretical or evaluative frame. In responding to her findings, I am inevitably interpreting them as I selectively focus, first, on the question of whether it is possible to engage an analytic process in teleanalysis and, second, on the ethical risks of teleanalysis.
In the early days of Skype and telephone sessions, there was considerable concern about how these media compromised the process such that what was being offered was “not really psychoanalysis” (Lemma and Caparrotta 2014). Some analysts underlined the fundamental differences between the in-person and remote modes of communication. For example, in her nuanced exploration of technology-mediated communication, Brahnam concluded: “In a way, in-person communication and distant communication resemble each other as much as whole foods resemble highly processed foods” (2017, 147), underscoring how technological mediation leads to a “fracture(ing) of the analytic field” (Brahnam 2017: 148). Others, such