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While telephone therapy was considered a highly unconventional method a decade ago, it has become much more prevalent in our current times partly because patients frequently change geographical locations. Consequently, Aronson's book is quite timely, and one wonders whether future authors will follow suit by publishing books that address therapy online, as this is also a fast-growing treatment method.
By highlighting a practice that some therapists may have been doing for years, but perhaps have been reluctant to talk or write about, this book contributes a needed perspective on an aspect of treatment that heretofore has been neglected. Most of the authors included in this book offer interesting and engaging case studies. Stark, for example, discusses a quite moving treatment process that took place over the phone for many years (). Unfortunately, not all of the chapters are of a uniformly high quality and a number of them seem to cover the relevant issues somewhat superficially.
Many of the authors, however, do offer interesting insights into the process of telephone therapy, along with its advantages and disadvantages with a wide range of clients and different mental disorders. Aronson, for example, describes it as a method to regulate the fear of intimacy with an eating-disordered client, or as a “transitional space” between therapist and client. Lindon suggests that it can serve as “defense against a longed-for fusion with the analyst” (p. 11). Spiro, however, warns that the analyst must not “wander into a conversational mode” (p. 71), and instead suggests that phone therapy requires more concentration because of lack of visual stimuli. He does feel that telephone therapy eliminates sources of interference in the clinical process, and minimizes the power differential in the therapeutic dyad, owing to the fact that neither patient nor therapist can use the sense of sight. Strean supports this idea in discussing a case where the patient, afraid of dealing with her e