(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 weekly supervisions, classes, personal training analyses, advisers, readers, and more as support. Policies regulating tele-analysis may speak more to a wish for that kind of support. 

Analytic work is to communicate through a distance and create a space for two people to meet. With my patients, I practice making this space and hold my own body in mind, and theirs as well. We did this in the room and we do this when we can only see our mediated digital faces on a screen. We are not doing digital and disembodied analysis, as analysis never could be disembodied; Freud refused that mind-body dualism. In just the patient’s voice alone, we can learn to listen for trembling, stumbling, stalling. The speed of their speech can help us hold their bodies in mind, even if we can’t see them. We feel our own bodies shift as they slow down or speed up, anxiety rises and subsides. 

My task as an analyst is to have a mind that is capacious enough to hold both my patients and myself through a digital frame and through all sorts of distance. I don’t see that as a weakness in my training. I see that as a challenge, and I see that as demanding even more rigor than in-person work might have. My supervisors would never let me compromise my work or myself by not expecting, and nurturing, my analytic mind. This is the rigor I was promised at the outset of training. And this is the rigor in which I am still being trained. 

Any preoccupation with a requirement of in-person work is a distraction. I, too, sometimes welcome distraction from the pain of this pandemic. But no location or setting can ensure an analytic process. That is the work of training. As a patient and an analyst, I miss in-person sessions, often desperately. But that loss and desperation must not be merged in our minds with the medium through which the work is conducted. Tele-analysis is not the problem; the pandemic is.