Hiers, Svetlana

Remote counselling for couples – innovation or desecration? - 2021.


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The author investigates the new care provision that disrupts the conventional ritual of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Remote counselling now requires a framework where spatial unity has been abolished. Henceforth, the therapeutic space comprises three overlapping locations - the therapist’s home, the patient’s home and the meeting interface, i.e. the digital platform - and patients draw the therapist’s gaze into their inner sanctum. The issue of privacy and intimacy arises. What is revealed? The patient can play with the creation of a mise-en-scene, even to the point of “ritual profanation” of the setting. The article provides a clinical illustration of a “reverse session”.