I have been thinking about how remote sessions differ from in-person sessions.
When we meet in person, you travel to see me. You leave what you were doing previously. You travel, you arrive. You sit down in my office. You may wait a few minutes in my waiting room. You are in my space—a space that exists for you as a space in which you do therapy or psychoanalysis, and in which you only do therapy or psychoanalysis. And you do it with me.
Before we encounter one another, you might use my bathroom, make yourself a cup of tea or coffee, take a moment to accustom yourself to being in my space. You engage in something of a ritual—preparing yourself, in whatever way is right for you, for our incipient session. At our appointed time, you most likely hear my door open, hear my footsteps coming down the hall to retrieve you from the waiting room, and you have some feelings. We greet one another in a familiar way and, together, we proceed to my office.
Whether you arrive before, at, or after our scheduled start time, you take in all sorts of sensory information. You take in the sights, sounds, smells of my building, my waiting room, me. I enter your consciousness not just in a cognitive way, but in a sensory way that itself has an existence in time. In other words, our session has begun—and a great deal has happened—by the time the session formally starts. And at the end of the session, all of these steps take place in reverse. You leave me, my office, my suite, my building. You take a train, or bus, or walk for some number of minutes before your life outside our work together fully resumes. You transition—from us, to you.
Video sessions differ dramatically from in-person sessions. The ritual of starting a session is radically attenuated. It begins with your computer or your phone—a device you may well be spending a great deal of time using. You use the device for a lot of purposes: to interact with colleagues, friends, romantic and sexual partners, family. You work on it. You read the news on it. You watch television, movies, other forms of entertainment on it. We join one another, in other words, in a space crowded with associations, memories, thoughts, and feelings—the vast majority of which have nothing to do with me, or with the work you and I do together.
It's worth reflecting on how much, already, is different from our normal patterns. Are you in the same space you've been in all day? Do you do our sessions somewhere else? Do you "arrive" at our sessions, taking time and space between what comes before and our session itself? Or do you simply switch screens? Do the sights and smells and sounds entering your awareness change? Are they associated with me? With our work together? Or are they the same as all the other sights, smells, sounds you take in all day, every day?
The transition from the virtual waiting room to the online session is a jarring one. You don't hear my door open, hear my footsteps, hear my voice. Your screen changes, and there I am. You only see part of me. You only see part of the room in which I'm meeting with you. Throughout our session, all of these differences loom—the quality of the audio, of the video, the inevitable glitches, the latency, the frozen frames, the lost connections.
None of this is to say anything negative about virtual sessions. You may well find them more comfortable, more convenient, safer. You may be better able to confide in me, to disclose, in this virtual context. Or you may not. What I'm saying is that virtual sessions are different from in-person sessions, and it's a mistake to imagine that they're not—that they don't give us lots to think, and talk, about.