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JCPTX 48(1):85-101 (2022) • DOI: 10.1080/0075417X.2022.2043413

The Only Way: Virtual Experience becomes Emotional Reality

Author: Stella Acquarone PhD

Stella Acquarone PhD

Adult and child psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In 1990 she founded the Parent Infant Clinic and School of Infant Mental Health (together the Parent Infant Centre) and in 2006 she organised the International Pre-Autistic Network (an international charity registered in the UK). The school was the first in the UK to offer an accredited training in parent-infant psychotherapy (accredited by the UKCP). Based in London, she has worked with parents and infants for thirty-two years in the National Health Service (NHS) and privately, pioneering early infant clinical research and development and laying the foundations of parent-infant psychotherapy. Academic, clinician, teacher, lecturer, conference organiser, researcher, and author, she is recognised world-wide as an authority on how to assess, diagnose and treat at-risk babies, promoting studies in early infant clinical research and development and pioneering many clinical innovations, including a case management Detection Scale and Graph for Early Relationships, mini-intensive and intensive Re:Start interventions that work through family relationships to reconnect the child with the family and vice-versa, and Child Focus and Special Child Focus (dealing with disability) clinical services. She has presented, led workshops, and trained professionals all over the world and has written extensively in professional papers, journals and chapters in books and had several books published, including Infant Parent Psychotherapy: A Handbook for Professionals, Signs of Autism In Infants: Recognition and Early Intervention, Changing Destinies: The Re:Start Infant Family Programme For Early Autistic Behaviours, Surviving The Early Years: The Importance Of Early Intervention With Babies At Risk, and (containing anxieties in the professionals working with under 5's and their families). She has been researching and working with infants with autistic tendencies since 1980 and her Re:Start programme offers an intensive early intervention approach administered by a multi-disciplinary therapy team and based on psychoanalytic thinking. She has taught infant observational studies and new clinical strategies in working with disturbed children. She is a member of the Neuropsychology Section of the British Psychological Society, the British Psychoanalytic Council, and the Association of Child Psychotherapists. You can follow her work and offerings at or on Twitter (@infantmh) and Facebook ().

Abstract

The pandemic has seen tele-therapy become ‘the only way’ for all of us, but the author has been using it since 2004 in her parent infant work. While she acknowledges and enumerates some of the frustrations inherent in tele-therapy, associated with its deviation from the classical psychoanalytic method, she also poses several questions: does it broaden the scope of psychoanalysis? Is it consistent with Freud’s ‘hope’ that ‘the increasing experience’ of psychoanalysts will include adaptations on behalf of patients, for instance those who cannot attend sessions in person? [Freud, S. (1912). Recommendations to physicians practising psycho-analysis, section (f). SE, XII, p. 120]. Also, are there aspects of tele-therapy that actually aid rather than hinder the aims, for example, the lessening of inhibition in virtual space? In the discussion, the author focuses on the screen as the defining aspect of tele-therapy. The screen becomes an intermediary point in the therapist-client interaction and relationship, which facilitates new aspects of mental functioning. These new aspects can include assimilating facial expressions (Darwin, 1872), the construction of a virtual space that activates internal objects, the speed needed to handle face-to-face psychoanalytic dialogue, and the surprise felt when internal obstacles or trauma are repositioned, lessened or neutralised in tele-therapy sessions where clients don’t expect their repressed unconscious conflicts to be noticed. In conclusion, the author puts forward a notion that tele-therapy can foster a ‘virtual space that becomes real’, in other words, a virtual experience that can become an emotionally-felt reality.

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