There's No Eye Contact in Online Therapy. What Have We Lost?

This will be a post about philosophy and therapy. Both can be highly verbal disciplines, which at times put great significance on linguistic subtleties. So I want to begin by considering what each of them has to say about a fundamentally non-verbal mode of human relating: eye contact.

An Eye for An Eye

Source: Sound On/Pexels

What is eye contact?

To define "eye contact," we might say: You and I make eye contact when I look at you and you look at me. But that’s not quite right. If I’m covertly watching you across the room, and you at the same time are eyeing my reflection in the mirror, we are looking at each other, but we are not making eye contact.

Perhaps eye contact demands something more: I see that you are looking at me, and you see that I am looking at you. But this isn’t quite right either. To take an argument from the philosopher James Laing, the author of a rewarding recent article on the philosophy of eye contact, consider two people flirting with each other from opposite ends of the bar, exchanging brief sideways glances. Each one is looking at the other, and each one sees that they are looked at by the other, but they are not making eye contact. In fact, if they were to make eye contact, that might spoil the whole game.

We don’t even need to turn to philosophy for cases of looking without eye contact. As Laing points out, most of us have been living in such a case for over a year now. When you at I are on a Zoom call, I look at you by looking at my monitor, and I show myself looking at you by looking very slightly away, at my camera. I never quite make eye contact with you, and you never quite make eye contact with me. I look at you and you see that I am looking at you. You look at me and I see that you are looking at me. But our eyes never meet.

The loss of eye contact in the Zoom era

The loss of eye contact was registered in the early weeks of the pandemic, but our responses to it, even among therapists, were characteristically technological. A quick search for "eye contact in online therapy" turns up as its first results the following:

• Software for “gaze correction” in online video
• Tips on how to position oneself during online therapy (briefly: sit back farther from the camera)
• A journal article proposing “a methodology to improve eye contact in telepsychotherapy”

These interventions promote themselves as being ways of improving or restoring eye contact in the setting of Zoom, but they are not even that. If I position my camera in a clever way to make it seem that I am looking straight into your eyes, then I do not make eye contact with you — at best, I trick you into thinking that I am making eye contact with you. So we are left with the question, what has been lost in the loss of eye contact?

Therapy and eye contact

Traditional modes of therapy are not well-positioned to make sense of this loss. Famously, therapy was originally practiced by Sigmund Freud and his followers in an arrangement that made eye contact impossible: the patient on the couch, gazing upwards, with the psychoanalyst seated behind the patient, and looking no place in particular.

There have been a range of explanations for this set-up, ranging from Freud’s personal predilections to the tendency of early patients to fainting (making a couch a good place to be). But I think that one point of this arrangement was precisely to discourage eye contact. The therapy office is a place of great verbal intimacy and, for that very reason, of no physical intimacy whatsoever. There are stories of analysts who would listen to their patients’ darkest fantasies for years on end and yet, on concluding the analysis, refuse to shake hands.

In such a fraught setting, eye contact is an unsettling presence. For eye contact affords us felt intimacy that is not conveyed through touch but which is nonetheless inexpressible in words. It is no wonder that even those therapists who do not obey the austere demands of analysis (couch, no self-revelation, no handshakes) nonetheless feel some uneasiness about eye contact.

Philosophy, therapy, and the phenomenon of eye contact

Where does this leave us? Philosophy has trouble saying what eye contact even is. Therapy, having recently incurred a sustained loss of eye contact, has trouble registering the scope of this loss or saying why it is a loss. Really, neither philosophy nor therapy seems to be altogether comfortable with the phenomenon of eye contact in the first place.

Philosophy Essential Reads

How the Upanishads Transformed the Human Mind

There Is a Massive Blind Spot in Our Knowledge

But this is how things go with philosophy and therapy. At the outset, I noted how both disciplines devote great attention to words. Another similarity is their tendency to give extended and often inconclusive attention to matters that can seem utterly familiar: eye contact, a breakup, the existence of the external world. So this discussion of something that all of us know well and none of us quite understand feels like a good enough place to begin.

To find a therapist, please visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.