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Abstract
A pandemic’s reach is broad, deep, layered—both as an infectious agent and as the psychological force that will be explored by the author in this paper. The disorder it creates and the sorrow it leaves in its wake can be found in traces of its existence that remain in written works generated in the time after the pandemic is thought to be over. The author draws from creative texts by imaginative writers and Freud written in the period after the 1918-1920 pandemic. This paper is intended to create an experience in reading that introduces ways in which we can look for the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in our own writing.
Notes
1 Some readers may have forgotten how our personal and professional lives were so suddenly and radically changed during the first year of this COVID-19 pandemic. The virus is, for many, now less lethal since the arrival of vaccines. Evidence of the forces it set in motion, however, remain both in our conscious awareness and in submerged forms that are expressed in ongoing personal and sociopolitical disturbance.
2 This Spanish flu pandemic killed between 17,000,000 and 50,000,000 people worldwide. Many children were orphaned, as this disease was especially lethal for those of the age group who had young children. Photographs remain of corpses stacked in the streets, scenes reminiscent of the refrigerated trailers where bodies were temporarily stored early in the current pandemic.
3 In the course of speaking about the analytic frame having been “disrupted on both sides” as we live within the existential circumstances created by the pandemic, LaFarge (Citation2021, p. 4) invokes—and amends—Freud’s famous metaphor for “evenly suspended attention” (1912, p. 110). Freud proposes that the analyst act as though he were a traveler on a train watching the changing views outside and reporting them to a fellow traveler within. LaFarge writes, “In the present moment, I would argue, we analysts are particularly made aware that we are on the same moving train as our patients, caught up in a pandemic to which we too are vulnerable” (p. 4). She then directs our attention to its implications for psychoanalytic writing.
4 Concurrent with the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, there has been much social unrest surrounding the greater awareness of systemic racism, along with political upheaval and mass shootings that threaten the foundation of democracy. These circumstances have been made all the worse by abandonment of leadership in the highest offices. This has created converging crises that contribute to disturbance and destabilization in this country. I will make no effort to address the manner in which each these external, nonpsychoanalytic elements—separately or collectively—may influence the current psychoanalytic writing environment.
5 Much has been in the air during this period. In the early months of the pandemic, online psychoanalytic presentations and webinars focused on the individual and collective trauma generated by COVID-19. This takes the form of bombardment by unseen threats that are difficult to metabolize and symbolize, leading to a sense of dread, PTSD symptoms, loss, and a need to mourn. (See, for example, IPA Webinars 2020a, 2020b.) The focus at this time was largely on the question of the capacity to bear these archaic and nameless anxieties: what could be taken in and what must be disavowed in an effort to close off what was coming in.
Throughout the remainder of 2020 and into 2021, the emphasis in psychoanalytic discourse in the US in large part shifted to the exploration of systemic racism. Here the emphasis was on taking in, of achieving radical openness.
When the issue of political divisiveness became its own failed conversation, it seemed as though the world became divided in two as 2022 approached. And neither “side” is taking in anything from the Other. Furthermore, efforts are made by some to censor contemporary voices and highly regarded written works by those seen as a threat.
6 When I wrote about the manner in which my psychoanalytic sensibility is expanded by immersing myself in modernist works (Griffin Citation2016), my sources at that time indicated that certain qualities of these texts—disruptions in the continuity of consciousness, fragmentation, and alterations in the treatment of time—were largely contributed to by the “destruction, loss, and sorrow [that had] entered the war on a scale unknown before” (Stevenson Citation1992, p. 137).
7 The threat still exists but is split from consciousness and walled off by omnipotent defenses that deny reality while searching for scapegoats.
8 Spinney (Citation2017) views the Spanish flu pandemic from a perspective that, while different from mine, is compatible with the view I take. She asserts that the imprint left by the trauma of this pandemic, which led to the “collective forgetting of the greatest massacre of the twentieth century” (p. 4), left a broad, worldwide footprint—an “invisible scrawl” (p. 5). This tracing only becomes legible when “a different storytelling approach” is employed—one much like the structure of the Talmud, in which each “ancient text is surrounded by commentaries, then by commentaries on the commentaries, in ever-increasing circles, until the central idea has been woven through space and time, into the fabric of communal memory” (Spinney Citation2017, pp. 5-9). Perhaps the footnotes in this paper have become something of this sort of commentary.
9 I am grateful that Outka (Citation2019) drew my attention to this essay, something I had read some years ago. I reread it with a new sensibility that prepared me to listen as it speaks about Woolf’s pandemic experience in a manner that she did not do as directly when commenting on her works of fiction.
10 Maxwell said he relived the events surrounding his mother’s death in the course of writing They Came Like Swallows (Burkhart 2005, p. 63). Writing about this book many years later, Maxwell said this about its structure: “If you toss a small stone into a pond, it will create a ripple that expands outward, wider and wider. And if you then toss a second stone it will again produce a widening circle inside the first one. And with the third stone there will be three expanding concentric circles before the pond recovers its stillness through the force of gravity. That is what I wanted my novel to be like” (Maxwell Citation1997, p. 928).
11 Although it is despair and a felt sense of deprivation that predominate in this novel, it is also clear, from this and other autobiographical works of fiction and from interviews he gave, that Maxwell not only experienced this set of feelings; he also felt remorse that he may have infected his mother with the influenza virus he brought into the home. This tormenting guilt made it even more difficult to explore his grief in writing. These circumstances made it virtually impossible for Maxwell to differentiate between guilty anxiety regarding deep longings for intimacy with his mother generated by the imagination and the external reality of his being a lethal agent. This is a consequence of a thinning of the barrier between inner and outer.
12 “I meant So Long, See You Tomorrow to be the story of somebody else’s tragedy, but the narrative weight is evenly distributed between the rifle shot [the title of the first chapter is “A Pistol Shot”] on the first page and my mother’s absence [the second chapter, “The Period of Mourning,” describes the facts of his mother’s death from influenza]. Now I have nothing more to say about the death of my mother, I think, forever. But it was a motivating force in four books” (Maxwell quoted in Seabrook Citation1982).
13 The title of the novel repeats a statement he and his childhood friend made to one another each day after leaving the construction site of the home where Maxwell would live with his father and stepmother—without his mother. It also alludes to Maxwell’s experience from day to day as he left his analytic sessions with Theodor Reik.
14 Alongside the sense of loss and sorrow in this novel is a murder and suicide. It is a murder resulting from illicit love: the dark side of love and a wish to solely possess another. Perhaps this is an allusion to punishment for oedipal longings—the greatest punishment: having his mother taken away from him. Still, the most prominent theme in this book—and the felt experience of reading it—is a state of deprivation and longing.
15 Maxwell’s editor, Roger Angell, urged him to eliminate the dog from the text—“to put the thinking dog to sleep” (Baxter Citation2004, p. 98). He felt Maxwell had pushed the reader’s imaginative capacities too far. Maxwell refused to back down.
16 One novelist (Baxter Citation2004) writes about the dog’s howl, which reaches beyond the failure of conventional language to convey the depth of deprivation and sorrow at the center of the novel: “Unspoken words are at the center of this book” (p. 95); “words will take us right to the edge of wordlessness; they will point to how the failure happens. We must say what is in our hearts if we can. But when we can’t, words can point to the howling, but they cannot quite howl themselves” (p. 101). Creative writings find a way to express—and/or to disavow—-such sorrow.
17 The editor of a two-volume collection of Maxwell’s works (Carduff Citation2008) describes the author’s felt sense of “deprivation” as “a psychic wound that nothing, not time or psychoanalysis or the satisfactions of adult life, can ever heal.”
18 “So Long, See You Tomorrow concerns itself first with the conditions of human experience rather than our understanding of that experience---with modes of being rather than of knowing—and with specific attention paid to how that experience exists on different yet overlapping levels” (Burkhardt Citation2005, p. 251). This is reminiscent of a conversation in contemporary clinical psychoanalysis regarding the role of understanding and existential states; see Ogden’s (Citation2019) discussion regarding epistemological and ontological psychoanalysis, the latter of which involves “becoming more fully alive” in the course of “creatively discovering meaning…in that state of being” (p. 661).
19 Baxter (Citation2004) reflects upon this passage: “What is done can be undone, but only in this book, only by means of art. Only in this novel does the word ‘destroy’ have a suffix to put it in the past and a prefix to negate it. To hold the destruction, on both sides, in suspension” (p. 105; emphasis in original).
20 I am grateful to Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, whose blog post (2020) introduced me to Freud’s letters to Pfister and Binswanger and to the fact that Sophie’s son Ernst was the child who inspired Freud’s ideas regarding the fort-da game.
21 Freud held the superstitious belief (which he took from Fleiss’s concept of physiological cycles based upon numbers) that he would die at age sixty-one or sixty-two, in 1918 or 1919 (Gay Citation1988, p. 58).
22 To see a short film of Freud, Sophie, and Ernst, go to: A short tender video of Freud—YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=vrGNhoIaEN4&feature=youtu.be.
23 Gay (Citation1988) asserts: “Was it an accident that the term ‘death drive’—Todestrieb—entered his [Freud’s] correspondence a week after Sophie Halberstadt’s death? It stands as a touching reminder of how deeply the loss of his daughter had distressed him. The loss can claim a subsidiary role, if not in the making of his analytic preoccupations with the destructiveness, then in determining its weight” (p. 395).
24 Arnost Lustig was a Holocaust survivor and creative writer who spent his adult life writing novels and short stories as an effort to be undestroyed. In an essay (Lustig Citation1998), he spoke of his effort to write a nonfictional account of his experience in the camps and of the retraumatization he encountered when trying to face the unbearable. When he attempted to use language to report what he saw as his mother, naked and with shaved head, walking across the yard to her death, he retched; he could not carry on with it. It was impossible for him to write the indigestible facts of it. He never returned to describe the realness of what happened unfiltered by a fictional world. (See also Griffin Citation2004.)
25 “Death looked at in this way, as something that happened to the patient but which the patient was not mature enough to experience, has the meaning of annihilation” (Winnicott Citation1974, p. 105).
26 Winnicott, someone who was himself an artist and a “clinical poet” (Rodman Citation2003, p. 29), says as much when he writes, “If what I say has truth in it, this will already have been dealt with by the world’s poets, but the flashes of insight that come in poetry cannot absolve us from our painful task” (Winnicott Citation1974, p. 103).
27 “The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded” (Kundera Citation1986, p. 132).