[Air-L] New Book Announcement: The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy

[Hannah G. M. Zeavin]

Dear colleagues,

I hope you and yours are holding up as well as possible in this endless
endlessness. With apologies for cross-posting, I’m writing because my first
book, *The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy*
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distance-cure%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank>*,* with
a Foreword by John Durham Peters, is out today from MIT Press. *The
Distance Cure *retells the history of therapy via its shadow form,
teletherapy—a form that has now, for the last 18 months, overtaken the
practice, becoming our default way of providing and receiving care.
Starting with a discussion of Freud’s own use of letter-writing for
analysis, through to radio broadcasts and call-in shows, suicide hotlines,
the elusive quest to make an AI therapist, and e-therapy, the book
culminates in a coda on our present moment and teletherapy during the
pandemic and uprisings of last summer.

There will also be some virtual, free public events in the near future: on
August 19th, at Gray Room x City Lights
<https://grayarea.org/event/the-distance-cure-book-launch/>, with Fred
Turner; with Grace Lavery at The Strand Bookstore
<https://www.strandbooks.com/events/event282?title=hannah_zeavin__grace_lavery_the_distance_cure>
on August 23; in conversation with the artist Chloe Bass at the Brooklyn
Public Library
<https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/art-world-conference-virtual-20210831>
on
August 31; and at McNally Jackson with Dr. Orna Guralnik (of
Showtime’s *Couples
Therapy*) on September 2
<https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/hannah-zeavin-conversation-dr-orna-guralnik>.
The
book is available online on IndieBound
<https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780262045926> and the American
Booksellers Association's Bookshop
<https://bookshop.org/books/the-distance-cure-a-history-of-teletherapy/9780262045926>.
I've attached some of the advance praise below, and if you’d like to hear
more about the book, I was recently interviewed by Adam Savage at San
Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures
<https://www.cityarts.net/event/the-distance-cure-a-history-of-teletherapy/>.
Thanks so much for considering it.

Warmly,
Hannah Zeavin

*Endorsements*

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. Too, 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*

-- 
Dr. Hannah Zeavin
Lecturer, UC Berkeley
author of *The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distance-cure> *(MIT Press, 2021)
zeavin.org