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What do Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Susan Isaac, Franz Fanon, Tony Grant, Laura Schlesinger, Albert Ellis, Norman Vincent Peale, Hotlines, Warmlines, Esther Perel, Uncle Ezra, ELIZA, Talkspace, PARRY and most therapists of every theoretical orientation today have in common? Their shared connection can be found in The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy by Hannah Zeavin. Beginning with Freud and the early psychoanalysts and ending with computerized therapies accessed on a smartphone, The Distance Cure is an enormous, sprawling academic endeavor, weaving together a history of teletherapy. It is an extremely interesting book published at a fortuitous moment when most of us feel like the world we know has been turned upside down.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists everywhere have scrambled to turn our homes into distant offices, communicating with our patients by telephone, by Zoom, or by other internet-based platforms. This change came suddenly without notice. Within a matter of days, our familiar, safe offices became a danger zone where a potentially lethal respiratory disease could silently spread. During this shared, unimagined crisis, many traditional psychoanalysts and psychotherapists experienced a tension between wanting to continue to be helpful to our patients, the need to make a living, and the unspoken allegiance to the norms of our training, many of which often explicitly prohibited the use of the phone or computer in
treatment. We needed to rethink basic therapeutic concepts,1 particularly the notion of setting and how the change of our usual setting affects the understanding of therapeutic intimacy, transference, and change. Zeavin in The Distance Cure has done much of the work for us.
Zeavin refocuses two of Freud’s early cases through the lens of distant treatment, emphasizing how analysis at a distance is as old as psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s own self-analysis was cond