Spatially Distant but Emotionally Close: A Personal Reflection on Psychoanalytic Distance Training

Abstract

Psychoanalytic training in countries with no accredited training program or official link to the international psychoanalytic community is possible only through technology. Serious controversies surround the legitimacy of distance training, based primarily on doubts about the efficacy of distance analysis. Curiously, in a discipline that prides itself on being a “talking cure,” an emphasis on the embodied presence of the analytic couple emerges in the literature over and over again. In fact, though, it’s through the use of language—and not through sight—that we achieve the aim of analysis. The information the analyst gathers from bodily presence is important, but even then the analyst’s job is to hear the patient’s unconscious communications. If an analyst, for whatever reason, is unable to hear the patient’s voice and unconscious communications, the analysis is bound to fail whether the patient is in the room or on the screen/phone. Being spatially distant poses no contradictions to psychoanalysis, as long as both parties—patient and analyst, supervisee and supervisor, candidate and instructor—are willing to listen, hear, and be heard emotionally.