Skype psychotherapy and pets: It brings us closer

Joseph Burgo’s story:

I’ve been a clinical psychologist for over 30 years. Trained in the psychoanalytic method, I spent most of my career in an office seated behind clients who lay on a couch. Then, three years ago, after several followers of my blog asked if I would be willing to work with them by Skype, I started practicing face-to-face video psychotherapy with clients all over the world. Usually I “meet” them in their homes.

Often, I meet their pets as well.

Noelle, a 42-year-old woman living in the Australian outback, reached out to me for help coping with a midlife crisis. She had recently learned she would never be able to bear children and was in profound grief. She usually spoke with me from her bedroom, where she would sit cross-legged on the bed. Often I heard her dogs, three Shelties, barking in the background. One day when they seemed especially obstreperous, she gathered them onto the bed with her. I will never forget the agonized expression on her face as she told me, “These are my children.”

As she wept, she held one of them close and buried her face in his fur. My chest ached and tears came to my eyes. Rather than the existential loneliness of weeping on a couch, staring up at a blank ceiling, hers was a grief shared with her animals. Although across the world and thousands of miles away from her, I shared it, too. We were together, all five of us, in the pain.

After all my years in practice, I’ve come to understand that the greatest influence on the healing process in psychotherapy, at least the way I practice it, is the love I feel for my clients and the love they come to feel for me. As a professional, I’m uneasy speaking this truth aloud, and my clients often don’t feel entirely comfortable with it either. The love we feel for our pets helps ease the way. I witness the affection they feel for their pets, they see mine for Alice, and it brings us closer.

Although Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic method encourages the analyst to present a blank screen, concealing all details of his personal life, thoughts and feelings, Freud himself practiced from his home and included Jo-Fi, his favorite Chow Chow, in many of his sessions. Freud supposedly relied on his pet’s reaction to a client for help in assessing the person’s character. He also felt that a dog’s presence helped to calm his clients.

I’m sure that if my teachers and supervisors from analytic training were to hear about the work I now do and my views on the healing power of love, they would shake their heads in disapproval, concerned that I had gone to the dogs.

Read another post about the therapeutic power of love. 

Thanks to Joseph Burgo, whose New York Times article and Opinionator blog post are excerpted here.  He is the author of the forthcoming book The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me World.