FORUM
Finding Intimacy, the Unconscious, and Embodied Place in the ‘Limbo-space’ of Telepsychoanalysis Molly MERSON
Rachel Jackson is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn.
Like many psychoanalysts, since 2020 my sessions have been facilitated by some kind of telephone or video media. Unlike many psychoanalysts, I have remained using telepsychoanalysis as my primary medium for facilitating the work, using both telephone and video to mediate sessions. The observable reason for the change from in-person-mediated psychoanalysis to telepsychoanalysis was part of a collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has been, and continues to be, deadly and devastating. Fortunately, many of my patients and I had the privilege to work from home or some other place. I have remained utilizing this technological medium because this format continues to work for me and my patients, and I have been able to experience the multitude of profound ways the unconscious works through whichever medium is available to it. While navigating and enduring the intensity of a pandemic, I grapple with how to live with integrity and accountability to environmental, social, and cultural transformations. I engage such questions in my clinical and personal life daily: How might we practice
in such a way that addresses and dismantles white supremacy, climate catastrophe, the rise of fascism, wealth disparity, economic apartheid, and the anti-Blackness and anti-life of the carceral state? Can psychoanalysis support the queering, the world-building, and imagination that is required for creating new metaphors and resourcing new ways of living1? Telepsychoanalysis is not an omnipotent cure for our catastrophes— in fact, the energy expenditure and mineral extractive practices used to power the Internet and devices are extensions of extractive colonialism, and devastate communities and climate— but telepsychoanalysis may be a way for us to keep talking and keep imagining while also shifting our relationship to our assumptions, including assumptions around movement, location, and what I call placefulness, or being connected to place. Through my embodied experience of telepsychoanalysis, I am coming to recognize that even if my patients and I are not in the same immediate body-to-body location, this 1 . See O’Brien & Abdelhadi (2022) Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 25
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embodied sense of place has not left us. As Anzaldúa (1987) says, “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back” (p. 21). Interestingly, through telepsychoanalysis, place becomes an even more visible and nameable element of our work. Patients, clinicians, and students are visibly accompanied by our places: we may see backgrounds change, hear the sounds of one’s location, and watch the light shift in the environment. Some even write our pronouns or the name of the traditional and ancestral Indigenous stewards of the unceded lands next to their own name on Zoom. The ongoing decolonial practice of naming pre-settler landscapes, culture, people, and ontologies is part of refusing the cultural seduction of denial of the oft-forgotten catastrophes of our time. Each time I name that I live and work on the unceded homelands of the Coast Miwok, Lisjan Ohlone, Patwin and Suisun people2, I hold myself accountable to a practice that roots myself into place by uprooting whitewashed cultural norms and reckoning with my set2 . Look up the names of the Indigenous stewards of your place here: https://native-land.ca/
