Zoom and its Discontents

Monday 11^th May

Zoom and its Discontents

Some early thoughts on online work under the pandemic (Nick Mercer)

Therapy in the online Underworld: shadow food in a shadow land or an authentic return to the mysteries? 

(Illustration below - Early Zoom Social Distancing)

Do Covid 19 and therapy share the same 2 metre gravity field?

John Osborne’s verdict on Waiting for Godot – counter to the general adulation – “A very long chew on a very dry prune”, comes to mind, along with the pallor of the Greek underworld as I sit squinting in an unnaturally hunched position at the tiny screen of my phone with knotted brow, straining to hear the communications of the ghostly figure before me. I indulge the various whims and fancies that drift through my otherwise empty transom - try them on like suits – now I’m Hamlet on the platform at Elsinore straining to hear the fading voice of the old king as the cock crows and the daylight shines through him, now Socrates back in Plato’s Cave - Withnail-like - by mistake - struggling to decipher the shapes and wondering why he returned.

These delinquent wanderings flourish in the lack of that physical proximity – why? Because these ghostly images lack the power of presence – cannot hold - that total immersion in the same air. Language is presence. Like Covid, therapy operates best around 2 metres … but also, like Covid, sometimes travels mysteriously.

The above were my thoughts a few sessions in, still struggling with the technology and pronouncing with spurious authority to avoid the pain of feeling stupid. Since then, since Friday 13^th March to be precise, I’ve done at least 10 hours a week on Zoom and Facetime, on phone, laptop and  iPad, and seen a whole rich new world open up, one almost unthinkable in the gloom of the old consulting rooms. Heresies abound. A brave new world, and such creatures in it, I muse, as a woman carrying a baby waves to the screen as she passes through the room, touches my client on the shoulder in gentle apology – a cat appears. Meanwhile at my end the postman calls and I have to answer. Each time, the space resumes without fuss and each time I’m less fazed as the old orthodoxies crumble. And each time the soup of it feels richer, that’s the thing that quickens the pulse…that the relationship – the allotted time and space of it -can not only survive outside the physical confines of the room but actually increase in potency by expanding to include the everyday.  Much like the realisation of those other rooms - AA and NA - the healing is not just in fellowship, but also in the incorporation of the ordinary – and, more specifically, in the unpredictability of the space – you don’t know/can’t control who’s going to be there – sometimes the interruptions are the free association equivalent – the memorable moment rather than the central spiel. The mad share that pierces the drift to collective bewitchment.

So, too, in the Zoom sessions – the ringing doorbell, the incoming call that darkens the screen at a crucial moment, the insistent scratching of the cat, the need for a piss – at both ends… for the first time I’ve had to go for a piss during a session – and be transparent about it afterwards – no use trying to retreat behind a blank screen after that - as tragi-farcical as a bullfighter sprawled in his own gore in the sand,  ineffectually waving the muleta at a newly woke bull.  

  I’ll say more on this and don’t mean to simply binarise it and say it’s good or better than the physical encounter.  Of course, we need the silence and the privacy as well – and the physical contact – the journey to the place of what is a dead ringer for an assignation year in, year out. The suspense of it all.  I’ve heard the sound of the arriving motorbike, the bicycle being locked up, a certain cough, a pause, and then the shock of the entry phone, the manner of answer, the tone of the voice, the use of the name, the creak of the stairs -  all those physical realities that herald and filter the entrance into the room.

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions, (TS Eliot – Ballad of J Alfred Prufrock)

Well - unlike Eliot’s Prufrock - with Zoom there will be no time. With Zoom a message appears telling me someone’s in the waiting room awaiting admittance. I press the key and a second message tells me they’re joining with audio, a pause of electronic fumbling - a disembodied voice - and they appear, suddenly, shockingly, in a flash of ectoplasm, usually with a magnified out-stretched hand describing a mudra in front of my face as they adjust the position of their screen. It’s different. In that receding physical past I’ve shook hands, hugged, given a barely perceptible silent nod to punctuate the arrival or parting – whatever felt right with that particular person. But with this all niceties are bypassed.

 Nonetheless, an interesting way of working… and this new way of working borne out of necessity has a different gestalt than pre-Covid on-line work. Like the virus, it’s new.

And as for ‘transference’ in the virtual world. Does it operate? Well, a mischievous comparison – pornography - does…. evokes a whole story within the spectator provoked by those pristine images of labyrinthine flesh -  a newly shocking fusion of bodies  in Rabelaisian abandon in a clarity and perspective/ point of view seldom seen in real life, amplified in impact by the new taboo of ‘proximity’. That works… albeit a tad one-sided.

So, what are the losses of time and distance – do fixed things like books, plays, poetry work? Things that need to be re-animated. Do they still stir us - evoke the ghosts of autobiography subtly different with each individual?

A resounding yes. So, too, a conversation, prefaced on the idea of a therapeutic encounter to evoke the trauma into visibility and release it with words,  to lend it a language other than bodily ailment and the mute reproach of silenced thoughts – a healthy freedom as opposed to thwarted rebellion.

That last an aside, really – more to do with the difference between Freud’s analyses of Leonardo Da Vinci and Schreber and his encounters with Dora and The Rat Man than the efficacy of online therapy.

But these encounters on Zoom are neither, especially if fleshed with the memory of previous encounters in the physical. Their meaning and potency is contextual - directly related to the proximity of the plague without. I’m on total lockdown, cannot stray beyond the steps of my house - some of my clients, too - and this concentrates – imbues these encounters with an increased valency.

Many things new become evident – a cat appears, my own, a doorbell rings that has to be answered – a baby cries then appears briefly in the arms of the mother who waves to me as she crosses to another room. Fort-Da. All these can be seen as obstacles to ‘the work’ (the hushed reverence of which speaks its deadness) rather than the work itself.  But view them as a dream-like stage set – a manifestation of the man or woman before you – the pictures, the discarded clothes – the books the cat and the woman and child - and a rare mirror glimpse occurs that shatters the frame of orthodoxy once considered essential to the rites of psychoanalysis. A good thing.

Last, I’m conscious that practically all the clients I’m currently seeing on-line I’ve previously seen in the room… even a couple who have come back after years away, so I don’t know how different it would be with someone known only through the screen from that crucial first encounter on. Though I’m sure I’ll soon find out.

Another last observation of note – in the sudden shock of the initial transition a couple of clients baulked, understandably, took time out, then joined with me in exploring the technology together. Thus, we entered this brave new world together and there is something about the transparency of that parity that yields the unexpected. I’ve seen them struggle with the sound, the camera position and the errant signal – and the occasional reach for the headphones to ensure privacy from their partner in the next room. And they’ve seen me struggle…oscillate between Zoom and FaceTime – change rooms to be nearer the router in the middle of the session in the early days when the picture froze – rather than sit transfixed straining to hear a fading voice while pantomiming empathy and vainly hoping the sound will recover before they ask me anything significant (In my defence, that last only a fugitive thought in the flicker of initial panic).

Like the virus, this new way of working finds you out – keeps you honest and challenges in a way the old encounters on familiar turf did not. A client with an artist’s eye instructs me, “You’re looking down on me…tilt, yes, yes, no…too much, too much…too deferential – back up, up… perfect”. And I listen. The old saw – embrace humility or suffer humiliation. In short, be seen.

 It would be good to hear how other therapists are finding their way with what looks like a permanent change for all of us. I share a room with another therapist in Cavendish Square and we were discussing this morning whether we continue or not. The dawning realisation that it’s not just us who won’t fancy a trip on the tube to Oxford Circus in any immediate future – nobody else will either. Interesting times.

Footnote: Final Diary entries… The world I wrote from below is gone, perhaps forever.

Friday, the 6th of March, watching the moon, waxing gibbous, crystallise and define at 10 to 5 on a sunny day, ahead of us the plague, coronavirus, COVID-19. like the lull before the storm 

Here we are on Tuesday the 10th of March 2020 not quite in lockdown, but it feels inevitable. In Italy the deaths rise and rise the whole country is on lockdown 60 million people confined to their homes unimaginable they reckon we are two weeks behind them and here am I high in my eyrie in Cavendish Square John Prince's Street looking down on the people hurrying to Oxford Circus tube. It’s hard to imagine the virus scything through the crowds and more so beneath the ground in the swirling maul of Oxford circus tube but I know it is and I know I’m watching it hurrying past... one can imagine it radiating out from there - the Victoria line the Central line spokes of the wheel criss-crossing the great city interacting with other spokes -  everywhere columns of people hurrying along, hurrying out from the big city with the deadly cargo throughout the countryside seaside towns rural towns market towns and villages posh enclaves all open to the enemy within – all Danae to the stars. I sat in the PA this morning in Hampstead with my antibacterial wipes and my antibacterial gel, my bog rolls and my water in the dawning knowledge I won't be coming back. 

Final Footnote

 Monday 29^th June 2020.

Since I wrote the above, I’ve been working solely on Zoom and FaceTime. I have new clients who I’ve only met online… only known as a flickering image in the scrying stone of my computer. After 3 months on total lockdown I see myself beside them, hirsute and wild, somewhere between Faust and Ben Gunn – a case of lockdown lycanthropy – and I’m torn between wonder and bewilderment. The encounters feel of a different richness – the defence of distance, the muting of affect welcomed by some. “I feel freer, it’s allowed me to say things I couldn’t say in the room”, says one. “When will I see you again”, says another, more a lament for a gone world than a question just for me. “Yes, I miss you, but also the going there, the being there.” Like some Newtonian law the novelty of the changing locations – seeing where they and I live - and the knowledge that it brings, offers some compensation for the loss of that shared air, the firefly rhythm of intimacy whereby we minutely mimic and accommodate in stretch and gesture, pulse and breath, the speech and action  of the other. In this strange new world I’ve listened through Tuscan pastures, the grass on the feet like the whisper of a brush on a snare, sheep bells clanking in the background and swallows arrowing by, trudged the wastes of Wanstead Flats, the gulls keening the deserted pitches, a world eerily bereft of meaning where the client becomes a Munch-like figure in a vast flat landscape. I’ve watched the weight of bookshelves bowing the shoulders and making supplicants of those before me and shared the sense of awe when something shifts and the shoulders unbend, the head comes up and we apprehend each other, perhaps for the first time, with direct eyes – and there’s nothing. A moment of equivalence. These are historic times, and what we do now matters. Much of the old stuff already feels irrelevant. But there’s great permission in it – an encouragement to the humility of not knowing what comes next.