Psychotherapy is, above all, about communicating with our patients. Dr. Joyce Aronson provides us with a breakthrough contribution on a frequently used pervasive instrument in our work: the telephone. There are few, if any, guidelines on the many issues involved when we use the telephone with our patients. This volume broaches many of the practical, subtle, and often complex dimensions ... Read moreof routine contacts, doing psychotherapy, dealing with special populations, crisis intervention, and legal issues, when we employ the telephone for therapeutic contact. I believe I speak for most clinicians in saying that some of our most perplexing and difficult times with patients occur on the phone. This book will be of tremendous help to practitioners in an area that has up to now been uncharted.
Edward J. Khantzian, M.D., Harvard Medical School Here it is! The admission that psychotherapy is done on the telephone. The decision to meet a patient's need for telephone contact is no longer considered a sin of gratification. Rather, this book demonstrates the usefulness of telephone contact in many circumstances, including geographical moves, hospitalization, business travel, crises of aloneness, suicidality, fear of intimacy, and addiction. Abundant clinical examples and a self-preservative chapter on legal and ethical issues further enrich this timely book. Telepsychotherapy is tailor-made for our highly mobile society in the global economy of the twenty-first century.
co-director, International Institute of Object Relations Therapy, Jill Scharff, M.D., co-director, International Institute of Object Relations Therapy Freud's bypass of face-face contact with his patients via the use of the couch has found a new and uncanny counterpart in the contemporary patient's communicating via telephones, answering machines, fax, e-mail, and so on. Previously restricted to an occasional refueling device, the use of the telephone has blossomed into a clinical diversity of astonishing range, including crisis intervention, long-term psychotherapy, long-distance psychotherapy, and even psychoanalysis. This remarkable book by Joyce Aronson helps us think in new ways, heightens our empathy with our patients' need for distance contact, and adds to our clinical armamentarium. A superb addition to the literature indeed!
Salman Akhtar, MD, is professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Show Less