Abstract
In his letter to JAPA, Todd Essig makes some comments to “correct the record” of what he calls my “serious misrepresentation” of his work, as well as “a pair of counterproductive assumptions” in my recent paper (Moshtagh 2020, JAPA 68/2).
Essig starts his letter by mocking the paper as “Nahaleh Moshtagh’s tale of an heroic journey to receive psychoanalytic training” and ends with the admonition “We should do better,” leaving me to wonder if there is something wrong with sharing one’s tale in a psychoanalytic journal. In fact, psychoanalysis was the fruit of Freud’s desire to listen to tales and hear their communications. Ever since, psychoanalysis has called us to open our horizons and go beyond ourselves to bear witness to another human being’s journey, in our consulting room, on the screen, or in texts. Was my journey heroic? It definitely feels like that to me. Adam Phillips, in Becoming Freud: The Making of Psychoanalysis (2014), suggests that to Freud heroes are “men who defined their moment, not men struggling to assimilate to their societies; . . . a man who would face, in a new way, the facts of his own life” (p. 5). In fact, that’s exactly what makes all distance candidates heroes. As I emphasize in my paper, we are facing life in a new way, passionately, courageously, and committed to our shared cause. This leads me to my second point.
While accusing me of serious misrepresentation of his work—by which he means not quoting the parts he prefers to highlight at the moment—Essig ignores the gist of my paper. He leaves out my theoretical argument on the importance of listening and hearing, remains inattentive to what he has registered about my awareness of losses and difficulties in being a distance candidate, and presents a version of my paper that would make it seem that all I discuss there is his work, and that even in that I misunderstand him. Perhaps something in his writings transmits double messages, almost creating a double bind. He claims he has a different intention, but people hear him and read him differently. I wonder if he wishes to stay on the side of hedging his bets, depending on context. It is interesting that he begins his argument with the following statement, which he considers his strongest point: “I want to state this as clearly as possible[:] a technologically mediated simulation of a traditional physically co-present relationship experience (i.e., a screen relation) is just as real, and can be just as powerful, as any other experience” (Essig 2015, p. 685). In the same article I write that “these new, mediated experiences of self and others are neither good nor bad, healthy nor unhealthy. They just are” (p. 682).
What should we conclude from these tautological and noninformative statements? “[It] is just as real, and can be just as powerful, as any other experience.” Is this a falsifiable statement? “They are neither good nor bad, healthy nor unhealthy. They just are.” What about this statement? How much information does it convey? But of course what Essig is implying is that though the mediated experience may be real, it is not a real psychoanalytic experience, since to him “growth, transformation, and healing [are] only possible when people are bodies together talking” (Essig and Russell 2017, p. 132). He claims that “the keystone holding your psychoanalytic future together just may be cherishing all that is unique, even sacred, in the deep, intimate conversation two people can have only when they are bodies together. That is where hope resides” (Turkle, Essig, and Russell 2017, p. 237; emphasis added).
To Essig, my view of distance learning, supervision, and analysis is an instance of the “better than nothing” argument, to which he responds, “let us acknowledge that some psychoanalytic care can be provided remotely via technologically mediated intimacies. But, to use an analogy, just because a surgeon can perform an emergency tracheotomy with a BIC pen . . . does not mean it should be used for routine care” (Essig and Russell 2017, p. 133). That is, doing any type of distance analytic work is like doing a tracheotomy with a BIC pen. I do not see then in what sense I have misunderstood Essig’s view or distorted his grand theoretical position. In fact, based on his usual “anti-mediated” therapeutic discourse, he may consider what I have reported in my paper a case of “sleepwalking,” a characterization that he likes to attribute to those who engage in analytic distance work. Here he writes for Forbes (December 27, 2019): We just may be complicit by the way we’re sleepwalking towards a future of artificial intimacy. What I see as a dystopian future of fully dehumanized and automated psychotherapy will not come about solely because the algorithms and devices reach a level of sophistication so far only imagined in science fiction. It will happen because we step-by-sleepwalking-step reach a point of numbly accepting relationships with and through machines as routinely good-enough replacements for actually being together.
Essig passionately disagrees with my argument and continues to refer to “human relations through screens,” as “screen relations,” as if screens can have a relationship to each other on their own! For someone coming from the White Institute, it is paradoxical that Essig tends to reify the concepts of object relationship and intimacy in speaking of screen relationship as if couples interacting with each other online or on the phone are screens rather than people.
In the last paragraph of his letter, Essig criticizes my emphasis on distance training being “the same” as that of local candidates. “The assumption is that this is a good thing,” he writes. “In fact, it’s part of her argument of why distant candidates should be treated the same as those receiving traditional in-person training experiences” [emphasis added]. In other words, while in the first part of his letter Essig says he shouldn’t be placed in the “anti-distant camp,” here he reveals that in his view we should be “treated” differently. That is a quite striking remark. He doesn’t say we should be evaluated differently, or classes should be held differently. He specifically says that we should be treated differently. My question is why? While my “sameness” argument is about training requirements and in reference to controversies over membership in major psychoanalytic organizations, Essig believes that feeling the same as local candidates is among my counterproductive points. How dare I argue that I’m the same as “those receiving traditional in-person training experiences”? In the next two lines, he tries to gloss over this, stating that he is concerned about “maximizing the gains,” which I simply find hard to stomach.
I hope I have been able to show that I have not misrepresented Todd Essig. It is more likely that he tends today not to favor the positon he has long espoused. Here it is important to note that I wrote my paper before Covid-19 wrought catastrophic changes in our personal lives and professional practices. Many analysts once dead-opposed to online work have now shifted to Skype, Zoom, or phone, and some have undergone a metamorphosis in their orthodox positions. Now, having experienced the pandemic, Todd Essig tries to present a totally different image of himself, struggling with great difficulty to walk away from his previous position. I invite Essig to write his tale of this heroic, radical change of heart toward distance analysis, supervision, and training.