Zoom and its Discontents
Monday 11th
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)
(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 13th 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 29th 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.
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