Paper short abstract:

“Answering the Call” discusses the rise of the crisis hotline and their origins in psycho-religious counseling in the United States. It explores the particular intersection of telephony with clinical care (the therapeutic frame, new intimacies) at work in this model of peer-to-peer tele-therapy.

Paper long abstract:

"Answering the Call" will attend to the rise of the suicide crisis hotline and its origins in the psycho-religious counseling. Crisis hotlines have their origins in mid-century American religious organizations that formed partnerships with psychoanalysts in order to create new models for pastoral counseling. Though the protocols enacted by these early hotlines vary, they all share both a psychoanalytic and a Protestant desire to reconfigure, regrow, and remediate their foundational relationships: that of analyst to patient and of pastor to congregation. The paper will explore the ways in which the remediation of the Catholic confessional into an "anonymous" crisis intervention hotline serves these aims through a discussion of the paradoxical reliance on the repressions of mediaticity at work in Protestant doctrine and the psychodynamic encounter.

"Answering the Call" will discuss the ways in which specific limits of access to clinical care have influenced the still ongoing use of telephony in peer-to-peer tele-therapy and shifted notions of successful care providing. Through exploring the particular clinical and culture models of care at work in these early hotlines, the paper opens onto questions of the therapeutic frame, intimacy, crisis and care: how do media technologies (such as the telephone) create new forms of relationality, and shift our understanding of psychiatric communications? What do new forms of embodiment, anonymity, and the brevity of an encounter do to conceptions of crisis treatment?