The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy

by Hannah Zeavin, John Durham Peters (Foreword)

Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions.

Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, video, personal computers, and mobile phones; the therapists (broadly defined) can be professional or untrained, strangers or chatbots. In The Distance Cure , Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a therapist, patient, and communication technology.

Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful , or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Technology, Science, History, Medicine, Psychoanalysis

328 pages, Hardcover

Published August 17, 2021

Reviews

[Saima Iqbal · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5/3.75?) i appreciated the reframe of the therapeutic dyad as a triad: patient, therapist, and medium of communication — which zeavin shows us has truly ranged over the field’s history. zeavin’s prose is impenetrable at times and some chapters lack enough organizing scaffolding or analysis. but the situation improves with each chapter. i still am left w qs abt the EFFECT of particular mediums on therapeutic relationships, but there may not be any single answer… and it seems the author is a media scholar foremost, not per se a hist-med person

[Isabelle Stehle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this as research for a presentation I did in my freshman seminar. Very slow but makes some interesting points on the relevance of teletherapy in today's world. Not bad just not my favorite style of writing.

[Ashwini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating read that got me thinking about the nature of a therapeutic relationship and the importance of the medium (and it's affordances). I view this broadly as a book on communication and connection that I strongly recommend

[Sophia]

Mother media doesn't apply to any of the things Hannah Zeavin writes about in her past books. She isn't as much of an applicable historian as she writes herself to be. Theory is... really just theory after all.