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This book debates the provision of psycho analytic psychotherapy via the internet. It gives a summary and discussion of current thinking about tele-therapy or e-therapy
and of the limitations of psychotherapy when regular face-to-face, co-present, meetings are not available. The author is based in Colorado but trained originally in London with the London Centre for Psychotherapy (now part of the British Psychotherapy Foundation (BPF) and refers to her ongoing involvement as both supervisor and ‘remote’ therapist with CAPA — the China American Psychoanalytical Alliance, which, ‘was formed to meet the request of Chinese mental health professionals for psychoanalytical psychotherapy training and treatment by providing classes and treatment via Skype …’ (p. 4). She may therefore be judged well-qualified to comment on the issues concerned.
The volume comprises 4 parts organized in 12 constituent chapters. To convey some of the flavour of the development, in Chapter 1, ‘The Western frontier’, the author, who describes herself as ‘not someone who [had previously] concentrated much on the body in the consulting room’ (p. 6), recounts becoming involved in CAPA, then coming to a realization that, ‘mediated treatment … [is] … not the same as the co-present process’ (p. 7); she describes beginning to pose questions for herself, ‘about what exactly we are doing when we use technological mediation for treatment’.
Chapter 2 then recounts initial explorations of the issues with colleagues, about whom the author states that, ‘Like myself, most of them had dived into computer-mediated psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy without knowing anything about the potential gains, losses or differences in comparison to co-present treatment’ (pp. 11-12). The chapter includes discussion around the multitude of factors that may (additionally) impinge on the analytic frame when computer mediation (‘simulation’) prevails, and the impact of analysing remotely on concentration, attention,