In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, Hannah Zeavin argues that, far from being a recent concern driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, teletherapy is as old as psychoanalysis itself. 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, Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology.
In "The Far Voice," Zeavin discusses the rise of the suicide crisis hotline (originated by Protestant clergy) in England and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and investigates how this service first became thinkable, and then widely adopted and used. She redescribes the hotline as psycho-religious in origin and intent, rather than as the secular service it has usually been assumed to be. She argues that these services, in their use of the peer-to-peer modality, radically upset former regimes of pastoral care and counseling, as well as those of psychodynamic therapy. Hotlines generate a new, hyper-transient frame for the helping encounter, removing nearly all the traditional aspects of the therapeutic setting except for speech and listening. At the same time, some hotlines devalue the need for expertise and rescind the fee associated with that expertise to protect callers; they use anonymous interactions to shield users from the careral imperative. They challenge every clinical concept associated with the structure and dynamic of the analytic encounter. It is contingent, it is not in person, and requires (or permits) a distanced intimacy with no guarantee of repeating; and it makes use of the phone—an appliance paradoxically thought of as capable of bringing people together and as responsible for their greater alienation.
Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is now out from MIT Press, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters. She is at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2023).
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