Hannah Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy(MIT Press2021, with a foreword by John Durham Peters) is a transnational social history of therapies deployed beyond the classic consulting room. Starting with a reading of epistolary conventions and Freud’s treatments-by-mail, her book shows that teletherapy, far from being a recent invention, is at least as old as psychoanalysis itself. Subsequent chapters demonstrate that psychotherapy has always operated through multiple communication technologies and media, including the letter, newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, the earliest mainframe networks, home computing, and now mobile phones. Teletherapy provides a unique frame for examining our pressing concerns, both theoretical and ethical, about the impact of technology on clinical and social relationships. While teletherapy promises the extension of access to mental healthcare beyond the consulting room for those who don’t have the means to frequent it, the reality is, of course, more complicated: care can quickly become a pernicious backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. At the same time, The Distance Cure contends that technologized mental health produces medium-specific forms of “distanced intimacy” which, rather than simply undermining embodied togetherness and attachment, also allow for unexpected kinds of communication.
The book is available for order at your local bookstore and online here.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“The Distance Cure is a work of pure brilliance. Hannah Zeavin is that rare scholar who connects past and future, distance and absence, external and internal, in compelling and vital ways. She writes powerfully and lucidly about the complexities of psychotherapy and its discontents. The result is arguably the most important book about the history of helping relationships, and the forms of communication on which they depend, in decades. Drop whatever you are doing and read this vital book: you will be better for it.”
Jonathan Metzl, Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University; author of Dying of Whiteness.
“This book is a fascinating, groundbreaking history of therapy, told from the perspective of the communication technologies that have long enabled it. A must-read for all scholars of technology, health, and communication.”
Mar Hicks, Associate Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology; author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing.
“In a world of over-mediated hyper-communication that has left us all feeling adrift and isolated, Zeavin's The Distance Cure gives us the history that we need to catch up with our future. Of course psychoanalysis, from the very beginning, played with the frame, with technology, with experimental configurations, to explore unknown, maybe even unknowable, forms of intimacy. We need to remember that this is possible—before amnesia sets in. Zeavin is ready to be your reminder.”
Jamieson Webster, author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis.
