Psychoanalysis in the time of coronavirus: From an onboard logbook during the pandemic

Abstract

During the lockdown, we, as analysts, had to face new situations, which disrupted our habitual mode of working and challenged our ability to adapt. I discovered that having a supportive relationship among colleagues became more important than ever. I will discuss the influence that the transition from in-presence sessions to the online modality during the pandemic has had on the therapeutic process and setting. The adoption of new relational working procedures instead of the usual in-person session has revived the centrality of those themes having to do with the body and sensoriality in psychoanalysis, including the possibility of recognizing and integrating dissociated embodied traumatic experiences, ones that are non-verbalized, and not able to be verbalized. I will outline a clinical case to detail the difficulties encountered in my clinical practice, in which the contingency strategy, based on working remotely, continued to guarantee that sense of security necessary to enable the possibility of dreaming together and freely exploring – introducing, however, within the relationship, aspects of Ferenczi and Rank’s “active technique,” which would not have occurred in person, and which certainly impacted the process in a different way, while always permitting the identification and assimilation of dissociated experiences.

Key words:

• psychoanalysis
• coronavirus
• embodied traumatic experiences
• active technique
• online psychotherapy
• hope

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Maria Loiacono

Anna Maria Loiacono is a relational/interpersonal psychotherapist and psychoanalyst who lives and works in Florence, Italy. She is President of the Training Department of the Sullivan Institute of Analytic Psychotherapy of Florence. Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst at the same Institute of Analytic Psychotherapy of Florence, since 1991. She is also: Vice President OPIFER (Confederation of Italian Relational Psychoanalyst Societies), Executive and Delegate Member of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies and Editorial Reader of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis. She has published clinical and theoretical articles, some of them in English, and the Italian version of “The Unformulated Experience” by D. B. Stern. Her book, La teoria interpersonale di H. S. Sullivan e la Clinica della Dissociazione [The Interpersonal Theory of H. S. Sullivan and the Clinical Treatment of Dissociation], Ed. Termanini, Genova, was published in 2016. She was the Chair of the XX IFPS Forum, held in Florence on October 17-20, 2018, dealing with “New Faces of Fear: Ongoing Transformations in our Society and in Clinical Practice”.