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Prior to the pandemic in early 2020, psychoanalysts were at best ambivalent about inhabiting the virtual consulting room. Some had been doing so for years, attending to the needs particularly of more affluent clients who would otherwise miss sessions through travelling, but also at times using Skype and WhatsApp to maintain contact with physically ill patients or those who for other reasons could not manage the daily or weekly round of in-person appointments. Others were resolutely opposed to the idea that psychoanalysis could be anything but an immediate (that is, ‘unmediated’), embodied encounter. The suspicious attitude of these analysts towards therapy at a distance - ‘teletherapy’ in the broad sense that Hannah Zeavin defines it, as ‘a genre to mean those therapies facilitated by a class of techniques and tools that allow patients to communicate with clinicians (or volunteers, or machines) not in their physical proximity at the time of communication’ (p. 24) - was not perverse. There are many worries, including about the commodification of therapy. Zeavin (p. 209) gives a personal account of approaching an online therapist: ‘After introducing herself, she immediately told me, “individual plans start at $32 per week.” The category of patient becomes continuous with that of client and then consumer,’ though she notes that this is not unique to teletherapy - private practice psychotherapists also negotiate their fee very early on and the implications of the slippage from ‘patient’ to client’ have long been debated. A more particular anxiety is that the absence of the patient’s body in the consulting room will reduce the information available to the therapist when assessing or monitoring a patient’s mental state. The question of whether an important source of diagnostic or transferential ‘data’ is lost by not being able to see the patient ‘directly’ and as a whole is a live one amongst analysts, though here Zeavin offers an anecdotal counter-instance of a therapist