“No Touching” argues that we can locate analytic solidarity in the boundaries drawn to protect analytic work from sexual enactment. The author traces ongoing elaborations of the notions of boundary and boundary violation as they become codified across the twentieth century in American (ego psychology) psychoanalysis and its legal and training institutions, in parallel with the retheorization of transference love toward a stable notion of erotic transference. The author argues that professional psychoanalytic institutions and associations only began to legislate boundary violation as a normative ethics problem when the feminization of psychoanalysis took place in the 1970s through the 1990s. The author then turns to the “overbounding” of analysis in its teletherapeutic contexts to ask if psychoanalytic suspicions of mediation are in part based in their capacity to suspend traditional forms of boundary violation.
No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity
hannah zeavin is an assistant professor of informatics at Indiana University. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2021) and at work on her second book Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2024). Zeavin is also the founding editor of Parapraxis and the codirector, with Alex Colston, of the Psychosocial Foundation. Other work on psychoanalysis, media, or their intersection has appeared in American Imago, Dissent, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, Technology and Culture, and elsewhere.
Hannah Zeavin; No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity. differences 1 December 2022; 33 (2-3): 110–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10124718
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