Near and far: representation of online psychotherapy in a group of clients

The research born with the aim of exploring the perspective with which the Digital Natives (ND) are confronted with online psychological counseling and video conference psychotherapy (VCP) is presented. To this end, 30 interviews were conducted, distinguishing those who had only experiences in offline settings, those who had experiences in mixed settings (offline/online) and those who had no experience of psychological interventions. The narratives were analyzed through a cluster analysis and a subsequent correspondence analysis. The results underline the importance of the physical co-presence and the organizational aspects of the setting as facilitating factors of the clinical process but do not allow to specifically characterize the NDs. The representations collected regarding online psychological counseling/VCP seem in fact to have been influenced more by the emotional correlates of the pandemic period than by the characteristics of remote psychological work.