Jeremy A. Greene will discuss his book The Doctor Who Wasn't There. Hannah Zeavin will also discuss her book The Distance Cure. They will both be joined in conversation by Michael Rossi. 

This event will be held in-person at Seminary Co-op. At this time, masks are required while in the store and strongly encouraged at outdoor events.

Register Here. 

About the book(s): The Doctor Who Wasn’t There traces the long arc of enthusiasm for—and skepticism of—electronic media in health and medicine. Over the past century, a series of new technologies promised to democratize access to healthcare. From the humble telephone to the connected smartphone, from FM radio to wireless wearables, from cable television to the “electronic brains” of networked mainframe computers: each new platform has promised a radical reformation of the healthcare landscape. With equal attention to history and the politics and economies of American healthcare, physician and historian Jeremy A. Greene explores the role that electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of our health. Today’s telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones of the 1920s, the radios that broadcasted health data in the 1940s, the closed-circuit televisions that enabled telemedicine in the 1950s, or the online systems that created electronic medical records in the 1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns today’s devices raise are prefigured in the past, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms also produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget, displaced by promises of ever newer forms of communication that took their place. Illuminating the social and technical contexts in which electronic medicine has been conceived and put into practice, Greene’s history shows the urgent stakes, then and now, for those who would seek in new media the means to build a more equitable future for American healthcare.

Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, 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, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology. Hannah Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.

About the author(s): Jeremy A. Greene is the William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, director of the Department of the History of Medicine, and director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine, and, most recently, coeditor of Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology, feminist STS, and media theory. She is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics. 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, under contract). Other academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Technology and Culture, American Imago, Media, Culture, & Society, and elsewhere. Essays and other public writing have appeared or are forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, Slate, The Washington Post, and beyond. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. She also serves as an Editorial Associate for The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and an Associate Editor for Psychoanalysis & History.

About the interlocutor: Michael Rossi is associate professor of the history of medicine, chair, conceptual and historical studies of science, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Event Location:

The Seminary Co-Op Bookstores5751 S Woodlawn Ave.Chicago, IL 60637

See map: Google Maps

Who is psychoanalysis for? Is it an archaic hobby of the bourgeoisie, or is there a version of psychoanalysis meaningful to all? How can this time-intensive and often costly technique of self-inquiry be made both available and useful to people dealing with ongoing threats to well-being, like economic hardship or racialized trauma? What are the possibilities and limitations of practicing psychoanalysis in conditions of extreme social duress, like colonial occupation? 20th-century practitioners from Wilhelm Reich to Frantz Fanon saw these questions as central to the field and created clinical practices with them in mind. Today, a new generation of clinicians has extended that legacy to challenge the reigning paradigm of mental health care as a form of behavior management, reviving psychoanalysis—with its vision of a slow path to self-knowledge as a mode of healing—in the process. Join theorists and practitioners hannah baer, Hannah Zeavin, and Lara Sheehi, along with Jewish Currents editor Ari M. Brostoff, for a conversation about psychoanalysis and the future of the clinic.

hannah baer is a writer, therapist, and activist based in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum and is a founding editor of Deluge Books, a literary press.

Lara Sheehi is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She is the co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an assistant professor at Indiana University and a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Her essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the founding editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left, which will be releasing its first issue in Fall 2022.

Ari M. Brostoff is a senior editor at Jewish Currents. Their first book, Missing Time, came out this year.

Register here.

Co-organised by CCRI and the Centre for Data, Culture & Society, this seminar will draw from, and spin off, Hannah Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, published by MIT Press, with a foreword by John Durham Peters. Hannah is at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, under contract). Other academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Technology and Culture, American Imago, Media, Culture, & Society, and elsewhere. Essays and other public writing have appeared or are forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, Slate, The Washington Post, and beyond.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centres on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology, feminist STS, and media theory. She is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference.

This event will be held in person and recorded. The room details will be found in the Order Confirmation you receive following registration. If you'd like to join this event live but are unable to attend in person please contact CCRI (ccri-info@ed.ac.uk); we’re exploring how we might offer an online live attendance option.

*Those who are able to attend in person are welcome to join us socially after the seminar to keep the conversation going. We'll be going to Doctors on Forrest Road.*

Jonathan Sterne, Keynote address for Digital IDEAS 2022. Hannah Zeavin as respondent. For more information and full schedule, click here.

Keynote for: Digital IDEAS 2022: Critical Access: Technology & Disability Justice. Respondent: Elizabeth Ellcessor

For more information see full schedule, here.

Reconsidering John C. Lilly is a one-day symposium convened by Hannah Zeavin (UC Berkeley) and Jeffrey Mathias (Cornell University).

For program and registration, click here.

John C. Lilly (1915-2001) was a trained physician, neurophysiologist, psychoanalyst, and counter cultural icon who had one of the most eccentric careers in 20th century science: he theorized extra-terrestrial language and intelligence, wrote quasi-philosophical treatises about computer science and consciousness, self experimented with  LSD and ketamine, and developed the first sensory deprivation tank (which he later used for his scientific tripping). Most famously, John Lilly worked with dolphins, trying to understand their forms of communication and teach them to speak English, later aiming to mediate human and dolphin communication via computer programs. Lilly was the epitome of mainstream science in the 50s and most of the 60s--but was eventually maligned and disowned by many of his former peers and collaborators.

Nonetheless, his work illuminates 20th century cultural and scientific phenomena ranging from the human potential movement to cybernetics. His experiments with radio, taping, and computer-assisted communication make his work pertinent to a range of additional fields. “Reconsidering John Lilly” brings together scholars from this wide variety of disciplines to reevaluate the life and career of John C. Lilly.

Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, 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, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology.

Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. In this event, Zeavin will discuss her new book, and its implications for the psychotherapeutic and counselling professions, with Birkbeck’s Professor Stephen Frosh.

Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley, and is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. She is a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Social Difference and Editorial Associate at The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Stephen Frosh is a clinical psychologist and a Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. He has helped to establish the new discipline of psychosocial studies, especially through considering the psychological, social and cultural applications of psychoanalytic theory. He has published  widely on issues of gender and identity and their relationship to developments in social life, and more recently, to questions of otherness and racist hate. His latest book, Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) explores the legacies of violence and suffering, especially in relation to questions of witnessing and forgiveness. 

This free event will take place on Microsoft Teams. Please register here.

JOIN US ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28 AT 7PM PT WHEN GRACE LAVERY CELEBRATES THE RELEASE OF HER MEMOIR, PLEASE MISS: A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING PENIS, WITH HANNAH ZEAVIN AT 9TH AVE!

This event is free to attend, but registration is required for those attending in person. 
Register here.
Masks or Proof of Vaccination are Required for In-Person Attendance.

Or watch online by registering here: 
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Dv_O4cFZT3CIYPPJoqjeTg
(No need to register via Eventbrite for online attendance)

Praise for Please Miss
“This is the queer memoir you've been waiting for; a dizzying mix of theory and pastiche, metafiction and memory. Please Miss is Terry Castle meets Lauren Slater meets Michelle Tea; hilarious and sexy and terrifying in its brilliance. But don't worry—Lavery is an avalanche you'll be glad to be buried under.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties

“Grace Lavery’s Please Miss is a polychromatic, wild and joyous gambol through a world which is like ours but blessedly twisted… Come for the laugh out loud miniature windsock on page one, stay for the fascinating analysis of a discarded pig part in Jude the Obscure, end up profoundly moved and profoundly grateful for this supremely intelligent, innovative, and important tale which is, as Lavery brilliantly puts it, ‘like all the rest, different from all the rest.’”—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

“Grace Lavery's memoir – if that's what it is? – is a daring, perverse, mind-blowing, intellectual, hilarious, outrageous, inspired work of art that somehow is touchingly sincere while giving no fucks whatsoever. I read this laughing out loud, clutching my pearls, my mind exploding in wonder. This meditation on trans bodies, queer sex, pop culture, academia, and fantasy rips open bold and badly needed new terrain in literature.”—Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir and Black Wave

About Please Miss
Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a magical mystery tour to find the source of these surreal missives. Misadventures abound: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a sixties femmebot; she writes a Juggalo Ghostbusters prequel and a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of a quiz show. Or is it vice versa? As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colors.

With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

About Grace Lavery
Grace Lavery is an associate professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. A prominent public intellectual and activist, she has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Autostraddle, the New Inquiry, Them, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Slate. She’s been sober since January 2016 and “full time” as a trans person since March 2018. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About Hannah Zeavin
Hannah Zeavin teaches in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley. Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is now out from MIT Press. Other work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences, Dissent, The Guardian, n+1, and beyond.

6pm GMT, 10am PST

Attendees will receive their unique link to join after registering, and will automatically receive a recording 24 hours after the event. Please note: this event is taking place in GMT. If you are based outside of the UK, check the time difference to your region. Participants will not be visible during this webinar.

In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, Hannah Zeavin shows that, far from a recent concern in the COVID-19 pandemic, teletherapy is as old as psychoanalysis itself. It may be well known that Sigmund Freud routinely used media metaphorically in his theories of the psychic apparatus; this talk recovers the early history of Freud’s real use of media in therapies over distance.

Zeavin reads epistolary and postal conventions in Freud’s moment, intertwined with Freud’s own epistolary self-analysis (in correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) and the unconventional treatment by correspondence of his only child patient, the agoraphobic “Little Hans,” in order to rethink the coincidental origins of psychoanalysis and teletherapy, and to help us think through narratives of loss that attend current uses of technology to mediate therapy. 

Buy the Book

‘The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy’ by Hannah Zeavin is available from the Freud Museum Shop.

Worldwide shipping available. Pick up your copy now >>For more information, click here.

Join the Department of Sociology for an insightful online seminar with Dr Hannah Zeavin. Registration here.

Dr Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley and is on the Executive Committee of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and on the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media. 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). Other work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences, Dissent, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Slate, Technology & Culture, The Washington Post, and beyond.

"Auto-Intimacy: Teletherapy by Algorithm" engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithmic automated therapies. I interrogate what therapy becomes when the traditional therapist is replaced by a computational actor. “Auto-Intimacy” opens with an overview of very early attempts to write a responsive algorithm which modeled a therapeutic relationship and addresses changes in automated therapy over the past fifty years. At the earliest moment of experimentation with automated therapies, two strains of work emerged: the simulation and detection of a disordered mind in the hopes of automating intake, diagnosis, and psychological education, and the simulation of a therapist toward the dream of automating therapeutic treatment. I will move to a brief discussion of the politics and “gamification” of contemporary psychological applications such as “Ellie” and “Joyable” and “iHelp,” which attempt to assist persons with a wide range of mental health disorders in managing their behaviour and moods. These applications, which are frequently offered by employers to employees, collapse the categories of wellness, stress, labor management, and mental health care.

This online webinar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Department of Sociology, to find out more visit the Department of Sociology and follow us on Facebook.

Join Media, Culture, and Communication alum Hannah Zeavin (PhD '18) for a talk about her latest book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press 2021).

Register here.

Register here.

Author Hannah Zeavin and Molly Merson discuss the evolving nature of therapeutic interactions over distance. In The Distance Cure (2021) historian Hannah Zeavin chronicles the history of teletherapy from Freud's letters to online Zoom sessions. Join Zeavin in conversation with Molly Merson to discuss teletherapy, and what the flexibility of the frame over the last 22 months has opened up around ethics of practice in psychoanalysis.

For more information and registration, click here.

This seminar will run as part of the ‘Doing History’ events series. This series is led by AboutFace York in affiliation with the Centre for Global Health Histories.

The discipline of History has changed radically over recent decades, as insights from other fields and interdisciplinary approaches have become more mainstream. Core questions remain, especially in light of Black Lives Matter, and related political and social movements that show how important and influential representations of the past can be in the present.

In connection with the Centre for Global Health Histories, AboutFace will hold a webinar featuring presentations on the broad question of ‘Doing History’, exploring methodological and epistemological questions about how we research, write and communicate History as an academic, societal and political endeavour.  This webinar has an interdisciplinary and international outlook.

The webinar will be held online via Zoom, 9:15am PST, 5:15pm GMT

Booking for this event will open in the Autumn Term.

A Conversation with Hannah Zeavin PhD and Linda Michaels

The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy
Thursday, November 11th, 2021 from 6PM-7:30 PM CST

REGISTER NOW

Houston Psychoanalytic Society Evening Speaker Series

Sigmund Freud, Teleanalyst: The Coincidental Emergence of Psychoanalysis and Teletherapy

Presented by Hannah Zeavin, PhD, Historian

Thursday, November 4, 2021

7:30PM – 9:00PM CST

Live via Zoom

*Pre-Registration required for Zoom invitation

Registration Fees

Members: Free

Non-Members: $20

CE/CME/CEU (1.5 hrs.) Fees

Active & Student Members: Free

Friend Members: $20

Non-Members: $20

Instructional Level: Beginner

It is well known that Sigmund Freud routinely used media metaphorically in his theories of the psychic apparatus; this chapter recovers the early history of Freud’s real use of media in therapies over distance. This talk reads epistolary and postal conventions in Freud’s moment, intertwined with Freud’s own epistolary self-analysis (in correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) and the unconventional treatment by correspondence of his only child patient, the agoraphobic “Little Hans,” in order to rethink the coincidental origins of psychoanalysis and teletherapy.

OBJECTIVES

1. Describe the coincidental origins of teleanalysis and psychoanalysis.

2. Explain the media conventions of early teletherapy.

3. Describe the history and import of Freud's own analysis and his "Little Hans" case for teletherapy.

Houston Psychoanalytic Society

1302 Waugh Dr. #276, Houston, TX 77019

(713) 429-5810

Visit Website | Email Us

Hannah Zeavin in conversation with Natasha Schull (NYU) at the NYU Center for the Humanities.

Date/Time
Thursday
30 Sep 2021
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm [IN PERSON AND ON ZOOM]

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Hannah Zeavin
Lecturer in History and English at UC Berkeley

“Auto-Intimacy: Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self” engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithmic automated therapies. Zeavin interrogates what therapy becomes when the traditional therapist is replaced by a computational actor. “Auto-Intimacy” opens with an overview of very early attempts to write a responsive algorithm which modeled a therapeutic relationship and addresses changes in automated therapy over the past fifty years. At the earliest moment of experimentation with automated therapies, two strains of work emerged: the simulation and detection of a disordered mind in the hopes of automating intake, diagnosis, and psychological education, and the simulation of a therapist toward the dream of automating therapeutic treatment. Zeavin will then move to a brief discussion of the politics and “gamification” of contemporary psychological applications such as “Ellie” and “Joyable” and “iHelp,” which attempt to assist persons with a wide range of mental health disorders in managing their behavior and moods. These applications, which are frequently offered by employers to employees, collapse the categories of wellness, stress, labor management, and mental health care.

Join me in conversation with Dr. Orna Guralnik!

Dr. Guarlnik is the star of Showtime’s docu-series Couples Therapy. She is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. Dr Guralnik is on faculty at NYU PostDoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at NIP (National Institute for the Psychotherapies) in NYC, where she teaches courses on the trans-generational transmission of trauma, socio-politics/ideology and psychoanalysis, and on dissociation.

For more information & to register, click here.

About this Event

While a greater recognition of the need for care emerged over the last year, modes of care have become increasingly technological and at screen’s length from our embodied lives; when we are in-person, we too are distant. Join artist Chloë Bass and scholar and critic Hannah Zeavin for a conversation about the many meanings of care, care’s potential violence, and the renewed importance of translating between digital and material form.

All registered attendees who provide a mailing address by August 24 will receive a package created by artist Chloë Bass.

RSVP

Hannah Zeavin + Grace Lavery: The Distance Cure

The Strand Bookstore

Monday August 23 06:00PM-07:00PM ET

This event is FREE.

Please register for the event here.

Join us for a virtual event with professor Hannah Zeavin for the launch of her new book The Distance Cure. Joining Hannah in conversation will be professor Grace Lavery. This event is free to attend and will be hosted on Crowdcast.io and be streamed on the Strand’s Facebook page.

Cant make the event? Purchase a copy of The Distance Cure here.

All book purchases will come with a signed bookplate by the author.

RSVP here.

Gray Area in conjunction with City Lights Booksellers and CIIS present author and scholar Hannah Zeavin in conversation with Professor Fred Turner, celebrating the launch of Hannah Zeavin’s new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy published by MIT Press.

The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy looks at psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud's treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions.

Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, 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, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology.

Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a dramatic disruption of our typical ways of providing psychotherapy. In this Forum Live event, experts in the field of technologically-mediated therapy will discuss their views on how this past year will change the future landscape therapies of depth, insight, and relationship. This panel discussion will tackle questions, both theoretical and practical, such as:  

How is therapy changed when it occurs online?

How much will physical proximity between patient and therapist matter in the future? How much should it matter?

What if our patients—or we as therapists--don’t want to return to in-person work?

How do we navigate differences between therapist and patient in preferred ways of working—in-person versus online? How much should our patients have a say in constructing the “frame”  of therapy going forward?

Many patients, and therapists, feel appreciative of the conveniences associated online therapy—a lack of commute, reduced burden for child-care, reduced time away from work, the ability to attend therapy when sick or on vacation. Are these conveniences unambiguously positive? Should we be at all suspicious of these conveniences and their impact clinical work or the lives of our patients?

PsiAN advocates for therapies of depth, insight, and relationship. Are there specific attributes or features of therapies of DIR that make us think differently about the value and benefits of teletherapy?

Going forward, should teletherapy be an exception to the rule, something we provide only in times where in person work is impossible? Is there a place for everyday provision of video/phone therapy outside of states of emergency? 

Are there risks to our work, and our field, of embracing online therapy as the new normal? 

The pandemic hastened the rise of therapy apps and avatars. How much should we be worrying about the future of traditional talk therapy? Is there anything we can do to beat back the tide of automatization in the field of mental health?

Session ID # 13196 – "A New AI Lexicon? : Challenges to the Critical AI discourse"

In this session, we will collectively strategize around how the key buzzwords of the critical AI or ethical AI community (eg. Fairness, Bias, Accountability, Transparency, Social Good) have limited the issues and contexts that are considered relevant and important sites of attention.
We will present a series of redefined as well as new terms that have been surfaced through contributions to the new AI lexicon blog project (presented by the contributors themselves)

The Distance Cure. A history of Teletherapy (MIT Press)

Tuesday, April 21th  3.30-5pm (BST)

Please email me if you would like to join for the link and book introduction.

Summary: Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud's treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions.

Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or sometimes more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, 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, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a therapeutic triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology.

Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help, describing its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is automatically lesser, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.  

12:50-1:50 p.m EST

NOTE: This is s a VIRTUAL event and requires advance registration.    

Grand Rounds are designed for mental health professionals, offered free of charge, and provide 1.0 continuing education credit (click here).

“Teletherapy In/Of Crisis: COVID-19 One Year On" explores what it means and has meant for both patients and clinicians to have mental health care go remote in the context of a global pandemic. What first appeared to be an emergency measure has continued, crisis becoming norm. This presentation traces the longer history of teletherapy as a shadow practice that is as old as psychoanalysis itself and almost always attends crisis. The talk will point to this history in order to help make sense of remote treatment in our present landscape. 

For registration and more information, visit Austen Riggs.

03/16 Tuesday | 5pm

RSVP is required. Please RSVP here.

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and the 370 Jay Project invite you to a discussion on games in the series “Co-Opting AI.”

This event will focus on how our intimate lives are mediated by technology, and artificial intelligence specifically, and vice versa. Featuring Gabriella Garcia, Hannah Zeavin, and Mona Sloane, the discussion will explore the themes of agency, care, connectedness, sexuality, (non-)humanness, and inequity.

Gabriella Garcia is a writer, performer, and poetic technologist. Her research primarily focuses on the protection of radical self-expression, networked subcultures, and cybernetic intimacy. As a performance artist, Gabriella works to create spaces ruled by vulnerability. She has performed in work curated by New York Restoration Project in partnership with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (LEIMAY), The Watermill Center (LEIMAY), SPRING/BREAK Art Show, MANA Contemporary, and Otion Front Studio. Her work has appeared at CultureHub, Pioneer Works, Museum of Sex, and Secret Project Robot. Garcia is currently working on the creation of Decoding Stigma, a cross-institutional thinking group bridging the gap between sex workers, academics and technologists. She is the Managing Editor of ADJACENT, NYU ITP’s online journal of emerging media.

Hannah Zeavin  is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at UC Berkeley, and a faculty affiliate of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society.  Her research focuses on the coordinated histories of technology and medicine. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, August 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2023). Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Logic Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and beyond.

Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on inequality in the context of AI design and policy. She frequently publishes and speaks about AI, ethics, equitability and policy in a global context. Mona is a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK), where she convenes the Co-Opting AI series and co-curates the The Shift series. She also is an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, an Affiliate of the Center for Responsible AI, and is part of the inaugural cohort of the Future Imagination Collaboratory (FIC) Fellows at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Mona is also affiliated with The GovLab in New York and works with Public Books as the editor of the Technology section. Her most recent project is Terra Incognita: Mapping NYC’s New Digital Public Spaces in the COVID-19 Outbreak which she leads as principal investigator. Mona currently also serves as principal investigator of the Procurement Roundtables project, a collaboration with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury (Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency & Accountability at Twitter, Founder of Parity), and John C. Havens (IEEE Standards Association) that is focused on innovating AI procurement to center equity and justice. Mona also works with Emmy Award-winning journalist and NYU journalism professor Hilke Schellmann on hiring algorithms, auditing, and new tools for investigative journalism and research on AI. With Dr. Matt Statler (NYU Stern), Mona is also leading the PIT-UN Career Fair project that looks to bring together students and organizations building up the public interest technology space. Mona is also affiliated with the Tübingen AI Center in Germany where she leads research on the operationalization of ethics in German AI startups. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has completed fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Cape Town. Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.

The Co-Opting AI event series is convened by Mona Sloane. They are hosted at IPK and co-sponsored by the 370 Jay Project and the NYU Center for Responsible AI.