The Distance Cure

“The Distance Cure is a work of pure brilliance. Hannah Zeavin is that rare scholar who connects past and future, distance and absence, external and internal, in compelling and vital ways. She writes powerfully and lucidly about the complexities of psychotherapy and its discontents. The result is arguably the most important book about the history of helping relationships, and the forms of communication on which they depend, in decades. Drop whatever you are doing and read this vital book: you will be better for it.”

Jonathan Metzl, Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University; author of Dying of Whiteness

“This book is a fascinating, groundbreaking history of therapy, told from the perspective of the communication technologies that have long enabled it. A must-read for all scholars of technology, health, and communication.”

Mar Hicks, Associate Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology; author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

“In a world of over-mediated hyper-communication that has left us all feeling adrift and isolated, Zeavin's The Distance Cure gives us the history that we need to catch up with our future. Of course psychoanalysis, from the very beginning, played with the frame, with technology, with experimental configurations, to explore unknown, maybe even unknowable, forms of intimacy. We need to remember that this is possible—before amnesia sets in. Zeavin is ready to be your reminder.

Jamieson Webster, author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis

"In the last year and a half, plenty of people have experienced the world of virtual therapy. But teletherapy has a long history that predates Zoom being ubiquitous, and Hannah Zeavin's new book The Distance Cure offers a comprehensive look at that history. Technology and mental health have a long shared history, and this helps put that into perspective."

Inside Hook

"An enticingly written and thoroughly researched monograph by Hannah Zeavin – a lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley - is the first ever academic foray into the history of modern teletherapy."

E & T: ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE

"Well-researched and enormously confident with the materials at hand"

The Point

"Zeavin's book begins with Freud and then moves on to survey different forms of therapy conducted from a distance: letter-writing, radio call-in shows, advice columns, therapist-simulating computer programs, and “concierge” smartphone apps that connect people with therapists, for a price."

Bookforum