Dwelling-Spaces as Sites for the Virtual Consulting-Room

The COVID-19 pandemic meant that for many in psychotherapy, there was a move to the virtual consulting-room. For the first time since Freud’s invention of the psychotherapeutic consulting-room, it changed globally. For some patients, this virtual consulting-room space can take place on the site of their own dwelling spaces. In my conceptualisation of the Room-object Spatial Matrix (Wright, The Physical and Virtual Space of the Consulting Room: Room-object Spaces, 2022) I suggest that during early object formation, room spaces can top-up the mother function and be introjected and re-spatialised in later rooms, including the physical and virtual space of the consulting room. In this essay I discuss a case in which the patient’s original Room-object space had many bad/unsafe elements of ‘home’ which re-manifested both in her current dwelling space and in the physical space of the consulting-room. While working in the virtual consulting-room within her own dwelling-space, a simultaneous experience of a de-toxifying and making safe, both her home and the consulting-room, is shown to have occurred through my ‘witnessing’ and containing her dwelling-space. This demonstrates what can be thought of as an enhancement of the psychotherapeutic work, where a safer, more comfortable, ‘in-dwelling Room-object’ space is enabled.