Description: Even for those of us with prior tele-analytic experience, our sudden immersion in practicing tele-analytically during the pandemic caused a seismic shift in our ordinary way of practicing with all the psychic reverberations such a change evokes.
Now that the dust has settled some, we have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve observed about the essential conditions for effective psychoanalytic work, the role of the external setting and physical presence, the role of the analyst’s internal setting, and what’s necessary for establishing and maintaining a useful analytic relationship.

Bio: Dr. Lena Theodorou Ehrlich is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and Visiting Faculty at the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Florida Psychoanalytic Center. Her writing and teaching focus on various aspects of clinical theory and practice, including obstacles to beginning, deepening, and ending an analysis, sustaining an analytic identity and practice, assessing analytic ability and supervisory countertransferences, and technical and conceptual considerations of tele-treatment. Her paper “Tele-Analysis: Slippery Slope or Rich Opportunity?” won the 2019 Prize Award from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association for excellence in psychoanalytic scholarship and distinguished contributions to the journal. In 2020, Dr. Ehrlich published a book entitled Psychoanalysis from the Inside Out: Developing and Sustaining an Analytic Identity and Practice. Recently, she has been honored with the 2024 Candidates’ Council Master Teacher Award. Lena is a Greek immigrant, a wife, mother, and a grandmother of delightful three-year old twin girls.