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The psychoanalytic world has been slow to openly engage with the possibilities afforded by new technologies of communication. Although use of the telephone in psychoanalysis (‘teleanalysis’) first appeared in the psychoanalytic literature in the 1950s, subsequent publications on the subject were scarce until the turn of the last century. This literary silence seems unlikely to reflect the actual prevalence of teleanalysis in psychoanalytic work, but is more likely the result of therapists' anxieties of being judged or criticised by colleagues for deviating beyond accepted clinical theory and practice.
It is, therefore, heartening to witness this year the publication of not one, but two books addressing the interface between psychoanalytic therapy and the telephone and Internet. Scharff's (2013) Psychoanalysis Online: Mental Health, Teletherapy and Training, the subject of this review, and Psychoanalysis in the Technoculture Era, by Lemma and Caparrotta (2014; also reviewed in this issue), both explore the questions and controversies raised by the use of technology in the consulting room. It seems improbable that the simultaneous publication of these two volumes is coincidental, but is more likely that it is due to a growing wave of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in the influence of social media and cyberspace on society, and open to adaptation of their theory and technique to incorporate these communication technologies in the best interests of patients.
Psychoanalysis Online, edited by Jill Savege Scharff, a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist based in Maryland, USA, is a collection of papers that emerged from an international workgroup of colleagues from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT) studying the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy conducted on the telephone and over the Internet. The chapters are written by psychoanalysts and psychoanalyti