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In everyday language, ‘teletherapy’ is generally understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. As a virtual, electronically mediated form of therapeutic communication, the emergence of teletherapy, at least in this understanding, was inextricably bound up with late twentieth-century advances in personal computing. Yet in Hannah Zeavin's The Distance Cure, ‘teletherapy’ bears a different signification. Derived from the Greek adjective tele (meaning ‘far off’), ‘teletherapy’ serves Zeavin as a catch-all for any form of therapeutic action at a distance. In this - more original and expansive - sense, teletherapy is far from new. Indeed, it ‘is at least as old as psychoanalysis itself’ (p. 4). Over five chapters and a coda, Zeavin charts the emergence and dissemination of new teletherapeutic modalities ranging from treatment by correspondence to the radio broadcast, the crisis hotline, automated computer-guided therapies, and finally e-therapies (‘now generally called teletherapy’, p. 179).
In the Introduction (‘Distanced Intimacies’), Zeavin grounds this history in a subtle theorization of the therapeutic scenario. ‘At its most basic, for a therapy to function’, Zeavin writes, ‘you need a patient expressing content within a relationship with a receptive other and what is called the “setting” or “frame”’ (p. 6). Encompassing the entire set of ‘ethical, temporal, and financial’ conventions that structure the therapeutic relationship together with the physical space in which it unfolds (p. 6), the frame operates as a regulator of intimacy within the treatment. When effective, the frame helps to sustain a working relationship between the clinician and the patient that is close but ‘not too close’ (6).
Although it organizes and structures the treatment, the therapeutic frame has never been rigid or static. Indeed, it has always been - albeit to differing degrees at different times and places - both flexible and responsive, open to theoretical renegotiation and practical alt