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Jill Savege Scharff is an internationally respected individual, couple and family psychoanalyst who works in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington DC. She is the author of many books and papers on the theory and technique of analytic work and has a strong interest in the line of object relations thinking after Fairbairn, a fellow Scot. She is the editor of a new book on the use of communication technology for analytic treatment and professional training (Savege Scharff 2013). This current paper reviews the kinds of clinical issues that arise when conducting analysis over the telephone or the internet and is a very good introduction to what is an increasing phenomenon generally, and certainly a part of the work that Jungians and psychoanalysts are doing in enabling the development of analytic trainings in countries without a home society.
I have taught and conducted consultations to professional colleagues by video link across time zones and have had a small number of telephone analytic sessions, but I have never conducted an analysis in this way, so I was fascinated to read about the kinds of issues that it raises. I was also impressed that telephone analysis was already being written about in the early 1950s (Saul 1951) though it is only really in the past 13 years that it has become a professional talking point, with an increasing number of papers being published and another book on the topic in 2011 (Carlino 2011).
The basic argument seems to be that analysis over the telephone and the internet (for example using video links such as Skype) works, but does it work properly or enough? Proponents of it suggest that it can uphold the standard tenets of analytic work: Hanly (2005), for example, found that ‘responsive holding, witnessing, and interpretive functions can be sustained, free association occurs, and the expression of paternal and maternal transferences are not compromised’ (Savege Scharff , pp. 84-85). Others found that it aids the analyst's suspende