A few years ago, I toyed with the idea of writing something on climate change. I wondered how this gigantic issue relates to psychoanalysis, which I see as concerning itself with the individual mind and lived experience, not with changing the social order, however urgent it feels to do such a thing. But for some reason, I continued to think about the idea. I gradually realized why the idea stayed with me. For the last 75 years, we have been living in the shadow of apocalypse: a threat of nuclear Armageddon during the cold war, a threat of cascading environmental catastrophe in more recent years. The end of the world has been on the edge of our consciousness for two generations now. I thought psychoanalysis would have a lot to say about the phenomena of a looming apocalypse, but I let the idea float around in my mind without making it a project. Then, Covid-19 hit us. For the first time ever, we were in the midst of a disaster threatening everyone in the universe at once. It seemed the perfect time to bring some thoughtful analysts together to figure out what this phenomenon was all about. I thought at first to edit an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry with the apocalypse as its subject. But I knew that would take many months. Then, I toyed with the idea of putting together a round-table discussion to be offered as a Zoom webinar. But so much was happening so quickly. We would need time to make sense of this period of constant flux qua a period of constant flux. I decided to create an online e-mail “roundtable” conversation to proceed over a 6-week period. I imagined that this project would be a kind of virtual “Decameron,” except instead of diverting each other with fabulous stories of different times and places, as with those medieval Florentine refugees, we would analyze the plague itself and what we were going through. Soon I was able to gather together a group of nine analysts, all of whom, in one way or another, had already begun to think about the subject. These were George Hagman, Andrew Samuels, Mauricio Cortina, Mel Bornstein, Joye Weisel-Barth, Cynthia Chalker, Gianni Nebbiosi, Judith Rustin, and Donna Orange. This issue is the fruit of this unique project, a transcription of our six-week conversation during the early chaotic days of the Covid-19 pandemic, spanning April 24 to June 14, 2020.
To get some sense of the menace hanging over us at this time, consider what was going on in New York City, where two of us currently lived and all of us had deep roots. New York City was deemed the epicenter of the virus at the time, accounting for 37% of all Covid deaths, according to a headline in The New York Times on the day of the first post of our conversation. The sirens wailed at all hours. White refrigerated trucks began appearing on the streets, housing the dead that overflowed the city morgues. Here in Los Angeles, people were panic buying toilet paper, dried legumes, and rubbing-alcohol to disinfect surfaces. We had a 6 pm curfew. Going to the supermarket required gloves and masks and overcoming fear. As someone somewhere noted, this mundane act took on the feel of a “Walking Dead” food run.
Here is a rough view of how our process worked. The conversation took place in text, as a series of e-mail exchanges conveyed through a listserv designed solely for this purpose. I invited a nonparticipating audience, which grew to 250 people listening in from all over the world. Each week I would offer a question/rumination to frame what felt to me to be the next stage of the conversation. I encouraged members of the audience to send me their own questions and responses in private e-mails, many of which I shared with the group and many of which found their way into these pages.
Some of the participants wrote spontaneously and contributed frequently, others tended to be more deliberate. The audience had to exert some labor connecting responses to their sources, especially when multiple e-mails intervened between statement and reaction. I found it necessary to provide a weekly summary to recenter the reader in the complex unfolding of ideas in interaction.
There were moments of conflict in our conversation, one small, the other explosive. I have decided to keep this difficult back and forth unedited, retaining even the more trivial of our disputes. In fact, I did very little editing of our conversation overall, even allowing for some repetition, in order to replicate as closely as possible on the page the immediacy of an online experience.
I have spoken of a conflict between us. It was an important conflict, I believe, and even though it exposed an aporia in the group’s thinking, it was an aporia worth meditating on. There is also much poetry, philosophy, and affection within these pages. One of my hopes is that this issue be a kind of message in the bottle for future readers, an image of a crisis in motion, playing out not on the small or big screen but through talk in text.
Daniel Goldin, Psy.D.
Issue Editor