by Claire Greenwood, MFT

ON BEING A TIKTOK THERAPIST

TikTok is a social media platform where users watch very short videos created by other users. The algorithm is good at knowing what your interests are (in my case: therapy, queer media, political and existential dread, dogs), and showing you videos that align with your interests. It’s addictive. 

A few years ago, I started a professional TikTok as a marketing tool. For whatever reason, my TikToks have become popular, and I now have close to 20,000 followers (small by TikTok standards but large for an account about psychoanalysis). I make videos mostly about psychoanalysis and therapy, but sometimes also about relationships and queerness, with off the cuff humor. I enjoy my videos and so do others. I show my intelligence, humor, and personality. Most of my referrals are now through TikTok. People come to me because they enjoy what they have seen of me.  

When I brought up the subject of my TikToks in consultation, my mentors were against it. We reached an impasse in which we could not think or speak about how social media might impact the therapeutic frame. In my experience, although social media is a ubiquitous part of life for most people under the age of 40, psychoanalysis has been slow to recognize and adapt to the realities of contemporary technology. 

This is for understandable reasons. As Greta Kaluzeviciute (2020) writes, psychoanalysts usually do not have public social media accounts because “the non-gratifying and non-interfering element of anonymity allows the therapist to be assimilated into the representational configurations of the patient’s subjective world. Equally, the ambiguity of the therapist promotes the development of transference.”

However, transference can and does develop when you meet your therapist on TikTok. In fact, it may be more explicit. Take, for example, Anna (name changed), who found and admired me on TikTok. The day before our first session she had a dream in which I was accompanying her on a large ship. Together we passed through all variations of weather, some beautiful and some terrifying, in search of a lost island. This was before ever meeting in person.

Transference from social media presents its own challenges. Like transference with a celebrity or author, there are elements of idealization; the therapist becomes an exciting and longed for object. But social media also has a refractory quality; people’s reactions are hard to see and pin down. In my practice, I now bring up social media early and often. We discuss if they will continue to watch my TikToks, and I request that if they see a video that confuses or disturbs them, they bring it into session. This is to avoid what Kaluzeviciute calls the internet’s “dissociative anonymity,” a quality that splits the “online psyche” from the “offline psyche.”  

Social media and technology are here to stay. I invite psychoanalysts to think with me about the joys and challenges of having an internet presence. Even if we don’t agree, we should be able to think about it.