News/Research

The Distance Cure Reviewed in The Nation

17 Jul, 2022

The Distance Cure Reviewed in The Nation

Danielle Carr review's Hannah Zeavin's "The Distance Cure" in The Nation. Hannah's amazing book investigates the mediation of intimacy from Sigmund Freud's talking cure to app based teletherapy.

From the review:

By rejecting a false hierarchy of intimacy, The Distance Cure points away from the dead-end approaches that rank types of intimacy and human communication based on their form instead of their content. In a deftly argued coda, Zeavin asserts that the problems with one or another type of therapy are inherent not to the medium or the physical proximity involved but often to the fact that we place so much more emphasis on the setting in which therapy takes place than on its outcomes. When we attribute our frustration with contemporary life to a medium alone, we foreclose the potential to find in these media the tools for building intimacy and solidarity. In other words, we mistake the symptom for the disease. If Freud was right about anything, it’s this: That’s no way to find a cure.

Read the article here!