The COVID-19 pandemic occasioned two shifts in psychoanalytic practice: the demand for therapeutic treatment increased (one in six British people are reported to have started some form of therapy during COVID-19), and analysts came to rely on online technology in unprecedented ways. Digital forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis provided an immediate remedy for national crises in mental health across both sides of the Atlantic that were intensified by the experience of living through a time of crisis and upheaval.

Amongst the psychoanalytic community, the move online prompted much discussion. Many of its members remain skeptical of the capacity of a digital form of therapy to replicate in-person treatment in a profession which places embodiment at the heart of its practice. These changes have forced a reckoning with the merits of the confines and constraints of the analyst’s office, and with the profession’s own investment — one might even say fetishization — of a particular kind of psychoanalytic practice.

Two new books — Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor and Hannah Zeavin’s The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy — speak to this unfolding debate about these new mediated forms of psychoanalysis. At stake in both discussions is the question of whether these adaptations open the path to a more democratic model of treatment which does not only cater to the middle-class but recognizes the importance of offering affordable psychic care to all.