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“Can you see my scars? Can you feel my heart?”
These touching lines about one person who can feel another were written by Boy Epic, a pop artist from Dallas, Texas, who rose to fame after uploading his songs, earning him millions of views.
We borrowed his lyrics to address some questions about online therapy.
Online therapy is becoming common practice in all disciplines of psychotherapy. Both psychodynamic therapists (Scharff, 2013) and cognitive-behavioral therapists (Andersson, 2018) use the Internet, particularly video conferences, for their work.
The concept of disembodied therapy questions traditional assumptions of necessary conditions for therapy. Holding, for example (Winnicott, 1971), a major term in psychodynamic psychotherapy, is based on actual maternal hands hugging and encompassing the baby. In remote therapy, not only are “real” hugs impossible, but it also sometimes feels as if you have a handless mother.
In their book Theory and Practice of Online Therapy, Weinberg and Rolnick (2019) expand the borders of online therapy to include family therapy, group therapy, and organizational consultation. Although the general approach of these authors is that video conferencing allows therapeutic processes to occur, many of the chapters in the book question whether classical interpersonal processes, including empathy, transference, and mutual regulation, can occur in a video conference in the same way they occur in traditional psychotherapy.
This article introduces several ideas regarding remote psychotherapy. It begins with a description of some theoretical issues presented in the above-mentioned book regarding the role of proximity and the physical body in psychotherapy. The article goes on to present some technological ways to “bring the body back to the scene.” Specifically, it focuses on psychophysiological measures used in online settings in which we cannot see the patient's body, but we can sense it via our sensors. It then recommends a unique type of camera that enables therapists to zoom in on the faces of their patients, yet at the same time see their full body. Toward the end of the article we suggest an experiment based on Taub and School (1978) to assess how remote treatment allows for dismantling of the various therapeutic factors that affect bodily self-regulation.
Body-to-Body Interaction
As biofeedback clinicians, we know that our body influences the body of the other. One...