COVID-19 IN V ACTS

ABSTRACT

This article follows almost chronologically the COVID crisis between March and May 2020 during what is called, at least in Europe, the “first wave”. Each ‘Act’ of our internal and external theatre is therefore a moment with a specific date, with the questions that were then pertinent. These ‘Acts’ were:

1. First was the setting up of remote sessions under health pressures and the recommendations of our psychoanalytic institutions. This change in the frame and its consequences will be presented from various technical points of view, which have ostensibly raised some original metapsychological hypotheses.

2. Then, concerning our profession, its very status as either essential or inessential has been discussed by public authorities, and inevitably by our patients, who will après-coup have to give meaning to our reactions during this crisis.

3. We will next study the effects of remote sessions, particularly from its psychoanalytic ‘economic’ perspective, and as a kind of ‘credit for in-presence’ in the early stages of quarantine.

4. We will then be looking at the hypothesis of a maternal element in the sessions, imperceptible in normal times, but suddenly palpable in the context of the absence of physical bodies.

5. Finally, we will propose developments through workshops as an option in order to find a response to this unexpected event at the global scale.

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KEYWORDS:

• COVID - Remote sessions
• psychoanalytical setting
• psychoanalytical process
• maternal factor of the session
• working groups

Notes

1 Monica Horovitz during an international seminar created to think originally the impact on psychoanalysis of a pandemic crisis.

2 Chervet, B. ‘Psychoanalytic work during remote sessions imposed by lockdown’, IPA website. Entry “Remote sessions”: 5

3 Motto quoted by Edgar Morin in an interview with France Info on April 4, 2020.

4 Sergei Pankejeff, in analysis with Freud between 1910 and 1914, and then for a few months in 1919, leaving Freud with a sense of failure.

5 Translator’s Note. A reference to La Fontaine’s fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper. The ant, who works all summer to prepare his nest and store food for winter, replies to the grasshopper, who just plays music and then suffers the arrival of winter … 

6 In 2002, Denis suggested an intra-drive construction made of two complementary elements: on the one hand ‘mastering’, and on the other ‘satisfaction’ – this being somehow a solution to avoid the 1920 problem of the death drive.

7 Translator’s note. Une chaussure is a shoe. Un chausson is a slipper. Un chausson aux pommes is an apple turnover. To be well shod is to be bien chaussé(e) [feminine and masculine declensions].

8 That is to say the set of projections onto the analyst and the analytical frame, which are related to the psychoanalytical field. The manifest side operates within the session’s concrete material and the analyst who is subjected to secondary subjectivation.

9 While "MF" represents the constant background of the maternal factor, “LE" and "ME" are the latent and manifest elements, finally "S" is the session. This writing shows graphically that on both sides of the two aspects, FM can intervene differently and threaten the feasibility of the session: when some patients refuse the proposal to maintain therapeutic work remotely, for example.

10 Different from that of ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ where Freud uncovers a resistance that cannot be overcome, “linked to two mutually correspondence themes, for the woman, penis envy, the positive aspiration to possess male genitalia, for the man rebellion against his passive or feminine position (…) for in the psychic field, the biological factor is really the rock bottom.” (Freud S. 1937: 357).

11 At the Congrès des Psychanalystes de Langue Française [CPLF], 2001.

12 The famous Freudian pact of the fundamental rule in the Outline of Psycho-Analysis. (Freud, 1938 : 174).