(Re)Locating Analytic Space

Distance is nothing new for psychoanalysts. Except for all the unimaginable newness, of course. The profound losses to be reckoned with for the training—and frankly, the life—I had imagined having before the pandemic. But I have been distant before this. Distant from myself when swept into an enactment. Distant from my patient when I don't join in their fantasy. Distant from my analyst when they don't collude in mine.

I am being trained in working at a distance. Sometimes it seems like we primarily think of training at this point in time as “distance psychoanalysis while in training” when, in fact, we are being trained in working at a distance. This, too, is nothing new.

The IPA continues discussion toward the creation of policies on “tele-analysis and supervision” in training. IPA institutes collect data to report on member opinions on tele. Committees, boards, institutes, and associations debate and survey.

What is it telling us about the state of psychoanalysis that the IPA would have us turn toward numbers and data at this time? As if data could possibly be a way to fend off the collapse of a society and field as we knew it, and a collapse within our own minds in the face of such trauma and losses? Surveys asking questions about in-person requirements for analysis speak to a desperate collective fantasy of managing what is not manageable. These debates and surveys also speak to a wish to portend an end of the pandemic or at least the “state of emergency” of the pandemic. We, as a field, are getting ready to return to what we cannot return to.

To be at a distance is to still be at, to still be located, not completely untethered. This has always been the analyst's task. Training at this time offers strengths that analysts who trained in decades past, who will likely decide policy, may not have. There may be a disadvantage, then, for those with the most experience in the field. They have not had the bizarre privilege of being a candidate at this time, with multiple wee