You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Having spent 12 years in the UK, working and training as a clincal psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the NHS, the idea of running a psychoanalytic practice in a small southern town of India could have seemed like professional hara-kiri...but for Skype. I began practising in India three years ago and moved, as if seamlessly, to doing therapy over Skype. I had some inhibitions to begin with. Would the screen block the patient’s projections? Would it interfere with my countertransference? But such concerns soon receded into the background. I took on Skype patients just as I would local ones who came to my clinic. In my mind, there was no distinction. Until eventually, I started feeling that something was amiss, but I seemed to lack the words and the experience to understand or explain to myself what that was.
Hence, I am thankful to Gillian Russell for writing a very readable, well researched and well thought-out book. Reading it felt like I was having a personal conversation with the author, and as soon as a question, concern or argument rose in my mind, there she was attending to precisely that! Eventually I had a framework to understand my experience, and more importantly the experience of my online patients. The book helped me to have discussions with my patients which were not just about paying lip service to the idea of understanding their experience. It was as if for the first time we were able to acknowledge a truth: the truth of our deprivation and our struggle to stay connected.
I feel I need to explain my perspective. I run a small psychoanalytic clinic in a small city in Kerala, India. We have four trainees. They all have their personal therapy online because there are no other qualified psychotherapists in the city. Our city is 10 hours by car from Bangalore, which is home to the most established clinical psychology training in the country. Clinical psychologists are slowly becoming open to the idea of being in personal therapy; however, sin