Lessons from the Pandemic: Part 1. Editor’s Introduction

Many months ago, soon after COVID-19 took hold in North America, I put out a call to members of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly community to try to observe the changes associated with the pandemic, with the hope that we could find some valuable lessons for psychoanalytic thought and practice from the events that had already caused much harm. Over the next few months, with the input of my Associate Editors, the project grew to include the many disturbances that stemmed from the precarious political moment, as well as from the pandemic itself. In this issue, we see the first group of thoughtful and incisive papers that resulted. The second group will appear in the April 2022 issue of the Quarterly.

Past historical events that surely reverberated through the psychoanalytic community have often failed to find broad expression in the analytic literature. World War II, for example, was represented by only a few articles and book reviews in the Quarterly, exploring wartime stress and fugue states (Fisher 1945; Jones 1945; Ross 1948) and the nature of the propaganda issued by both totalitarian and democratic states (Kris 1943; Saul 1942).

And pandemics have been much less written about, in any genre, than wars. In Pale Rider (2017), a study of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic and its inscription in memory, Spinney observes that, although the so-called Spanish flu killed at least 50,000,000 people across the globe—many more than the number claimed by the First World War—the pandemic has left few testaments in literature or elsewhere, in contrast with the vast literature emanating from the war. Spinney attributes this difference in part to the footprint of each of the events in space and time; the war was geographically focused and extended for four years, and it was possible to create the kind of unfolding narrative that permits us to remember. The Spanish flu, however, invaded the entire world in an unimaginably short time: most of the deaths occurred within a single 13-week period. Memory, Spinney argues, must be built up gradually, in succeeding layers of associations.

Fred L. Griffin, who contributes the first of the papers in this issue, uses literature to explore in detail the relationship between memory and the 1918-1920 pandemic. The massive losses of that pandemic, he argues, led not to an absence or foreclosure of memory, but to the presence of spectral memory; the literature of the era is haunted by shadowy allusions to the pandemic. The current COVID-19 pandemic, in turn, sensitizes the contemporary reader to those earlier losses and enables us to appreciate the literature emanating from the earlier pandemic in a new way.

The effects of the pandemic are also hard to capture in analytic work because both analyst and patient are caught up in the same overwhelming trauma; the narrative self of each is interrupted and must be reconstituted. Camus describes this process of desubjectification in a novel, The Plague (1948): “It might indeed be said that the first effect of this brutal visitation was to compel our townspeople to act as if they had no feelings as individuals” (p. 68). In sad, partial compensation, each individual is pulled to establish a sense of himself by cutting himself off from all awareness of social ties. What was predominant was an “extremity of solitude”; each individual “had to bear the load of his troubles alone” (p. 76).

How is this loss of uniqueness felt and countered in psychoanalysis? How can the analytic dyad reconstitute as a fruitful couple?

Three of the papers in this issue deal directly with the clinical situation that arises in the altered circumstances of the pandemic. Steven H. Cooper shares his observation that the patient’s anxiety and helplessness tilt his self-experience toward passivity; for the analyst, the same forces lead to a loss of confidence in confronting resistance. Richard B. Zimmer argues that the circumstances of the pandemic have required a renegotiation of the frame in each analysis. Forced to prioritize the value of the different aspects of the frame in order to preserve the most important, he puts in first place his need to remain emotionally authentic with his patients and his continuing attention to the manifestations of unconscious fantasy. Giuseppe Civitarese, by contrast, argues that, while attention must be paid to the special circumstances of the pandemic, analytic work rests upon the analyst’s “fictionalizing” this---constructing a narrative in which references to the pandemic, like other associations, are seen as communications in the here and now concerning the drama that takes place in the analytic field.

Disruptions in the field expose the framework that is essential to the analyst’s work. For Zimmer, this framework is unique to each analytic couple; its renegotiation in the changed circumstances of the pandemic leads him to question the essential nature of many of the parameters of analytic work that have traditionally been prescribed. For Civitarese, the alienation fostered by the pandemic highlights the human dilemma in which we must turn to the other for recognition and constitution of the self, but this dependency also places us at risk of destructive “infection.”

Finally, our fifth contributor on this topic, Richard B. Simpson, takes the occasion of the pandemic to formulate his vision of what is essential to the project of analysis: the analyst’s promotion of a special way of thinking linked to the unconscious and the paradigmatic logic that is essential to our metapsychology. These, for Simpson, form the roots of the rules and conventions that have been challenged by the pandemic.