ABSTRACT
As studies in technological communication show, there is a danger that the participants stop themselves from knowing when the technology fails and when the functional equivalence ends. In that state, one is not occupying an internal space from which psychoanalytic understanding can emerge. It is a far shallower place, without the possibility of natural silences and the capacity to wait for the patient to discover how to make use of the analyst. There is a real danger of missing the shift and not knowing that it has happened. A prime concern with technologically mediated treatment is that the elimination of co-present bodies largely confines the psychoanalytic process to “states of mind” rather than “states of being”. It is when one can dwell in a “state of being” that one can take part in the psychoanalytic process of communicating with oneself and the other.
