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<p>Like other professional fields, psychotherapy faces the challenges of the digital age and responds to them in its discourse. This article examines 31&#xa0;statements issued by German psychotherapist’ chambers and professional associations between 2014 and 2023 in response to draft bills and enacted laws concerning digitalization measures in psychotherapy. The <i>Digitale-Versorgung-Gesetz</i> (DVG), which introduced digital health applications (DiGAs) into the German health care system at the end of 2019, is the most salient discursive event in this context. Since then, people with statutory health insurance in Germany have been entitled to these apps, provided they are prescribed by a&#xa0;physician or psychotherapist. For the most part, they are designed as self-help tools based on self-tracking and psychoeducation and operate entirely without any personal therapeutic contact. The present study traces how digitization and the accompanying juridification and economization have found their way into the discourse of psychotherapy. This becomes particularly evident in shifts of several of the discourse’s key terms: Patients increasingly become “the insured”; therapists become “service providers”; and the therapeutic relationship disappears behind the term “physical co-presence”. With this latter shift, what once denoted a&#xa0;malleable communicative and affective space of resonance is reduced to the occasional mere co-location of therapist and patient—and this factual co-presence is elevated to a&#xa0;new therapeutic gold standard. Psychotherapists’ chambers and professional associations do not contest the use of psychotherapeutic DiGAs on principle or debate their appropriateness in specific contexts; rather, they quickly turn to questions of effectiveness and efficiency and to professional–policy concerns. What largely goes unsaid is that such applications do not exist in a&#xa0;vacuum but are embedded in institutions and power structures, that their promotion is driven by economic and political interests and actors, and that the shift to digital care is creating fundamentally altered forms of psychotherapeutic practice that warrant careful scrutiny and evaluation beyond economic considerations.</p>

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Die Psychotherapie im Zeitalter ihrer digitalen Vereinnahmung

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月21日

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  • Pauline Hammans,
  • Thomas Slunecko

摘要

Like other professional fields, psychotherapy faces the challenges of the digital age and responds to them in its discourse. This article examines 31 statements issued by German psychotherapist’ chambers and professional associations between 2014 and 2023 in response to draft bills and enacted laws concerning digitalization measures in psychotherapy. The Digitale-Versorgung-Gesetz (DVG), which introduced digital health applications (DiGAs) into the German health care system at the end of 2019, is the most salient discursive event in this context. Since then, people with statutory health insurance in Germany have been entitled to these apps, provided they are prescribed by a physician or psychotherapist. For the most part, they are designed as self-help tools based on self-tracking and psychoeducation and operate entirely without any personal therapeutic contact. The present study traces how digitization and the accompanying juridification and economization have found their way into the discourse of psychotherapy. This becomes particularly evident in shifts of several of the discourse’s key terms: Patients increasingly become “the insured”; therapists become “service providers”; and the therapeutic relationship disappears behind the term “physical co-presence”. With this latter shift, what once denoted a malleable communicative and affective space of resonance is reduced to the occasional mere co-location of therapist and patient—and this factual co-presence is elevated to a new therapeutic gold standard. Psychotherapists’ chambers and professional associations do not contest the use of psychotherapeutic DiGAs on principle or debate their appropriateness in specific contexts; rather, they quickly turn to questions of effectiveness and efficiency and to professional–policy concerns. What largely goes unsaid is that such applications do not exist in a vacuum but are embedded in institutions and power structures, that their promotion is driven by economic and political interests and actors, and that the shift to digital care is creating fundamentally altered forms of psychotherapeutic practice that warrant careful scrutiny and evaluation beyond economic considerations.