The Absence Whose Name is Covid: Trauma, Neglect, and the Primal Split

The “other” has to be created before it can be perceived (Milner, 1969, p. 404)

For most, it seems, Covid came and Covid went. But for me, Covid is still very much alive, present in its absence. We’ve had no choice but to move on, to live.

And yet.

There is a hole ripped in the knitted together fabric of our shared human narrative, a blank spot we strive valiantly to cover over with meaningful activity and connection. This blank spot is the darkest recess of the primal split.

On neglect, adult onset trauma, and the center that cannot hold: The contours of the primal split

In adult onset trauma, the process of meaning-making, underwritten by the good object comes under attack, leaving a meaningless void that cannot be filled (Laub, 2005). Covid was a trauma of loneliness, of absence, the absence of the good mother, a trauma of no-one-ness.

But, for those who suffered traumatic, early neglect, Covid recapitulated an old wound, the nameless dread of nonexistence. Before the split into good and bad, prior to even the split into deadness and aliveness, there is the most primal split into existence and nonexistence based on the reliable presence or absence of the primary caretaker (Winnicott, 1945). Speaking of early neglect, Green (1997) wrote that for some patients, “the non-existence, will become, at some point, the only thing that is real” (p. 1082). In this case, the absence of the object is more psychically real than its presence, and this void becomes a protected space of non-being inside, inhibiting the elaboration of internal objects, undoing authentic relating to self and other (Sopher, 2018).

And now I am back in my analyst’s office for the first time.

She wears a mask. I do not.

I lost hold of you inside, I tell her.

I know, she says

We talk about the way our separation replayed the early neglect of my childhood. I worried incessantly about never seeing her office again. I think of how the analytic setting contains the psychotic parts of the personality (Bleger, 1967). Without it, I was left alone to contend with my psychotic parts, to contain my wish for fusion, my wish for primal merger guaranteeing some figment of animalistic safety. Eventually we renegotiate our relationship into one that can be lost and found: a new, less addictive attachment beyond the realm of existence and nonexistence, beyond the primal split.

And now I sit with my patient Daniel.

It has been two months since we have returned to seeing each other in person. When Daniel and I started working together, he sat for sessions in silence, in what he called the “locked-in syndrome,” a dreadful internal state in which he could not reach out or be reached. Now, after six years of working together, Daniel has become more able to speak through his silent, locked-in states. We began to give shape to the all-pervading absence that occupied his most central core and most intractable beliefs about himself and his “invisibility.” We could talk about the ways he and I absented ourselves from the treatment and from each other.

That was before Covid.

He is back in my office now and though we have talked about his loss of me and the analytic setting as live presences inside, it feels as if our words float aimlessly through space, disembodied and dead on impact. On the level of the verbal we are deeply personal, but in the enacted dimension we are in a space of erasure and nonexistence.

And now he sits in silence before me. Locked in, as he was before our Covid-induced separation. He is as though a stranger. I associate to the way the reality of my own analyst was lost inside of me. Like Daniel, I feel hopeless. He is gone for me, just as I am for him.

“I think you must feel that I am still gone, that I’m not here, maybe that I never even existed,” I tell him.

A spark of life (anger?) flashes in his eyes before quickly going dead again.

“Yes,” he murmurs somewhat reluctantly. “For me you are gone. Maybe this time we can’t go back.”

“I understand,” I say, “I left you alone for too long.”

He pulls his hair. “No,” shaking his head.

I think of Alvarez’ work with undrawn patients, the ways she reached out to get into their line of sight. I move to catch Daniel’s eye, “I left you for too long,” I repeat, “and there’s a part of you that believes I don’t exist, that I’ve never been here at all.” Somehow, this repetition, this act of reaching out, wakes us both up, as if from a dream. Something new is created as we emerge from the space of nonbeing and deadness to a territory beyond the primal split.

Daniel sits. Daniel mulls. We slowly give contours to the absent object, define it, helping to contain the presence of a person who should have been there in the past but wasn’t. The challenge of children of neglect – to give shape to an object that never was.

Like Daniel, we, as a global community, are called to draw borders around what is yet undrawn in our collective consciousness. Mark the edges of the blank spot in our narrative that is yet to be named and understood, to connect in and through our shared history of trauma: the absence whose name is Covid that is still alive and present in ourselves, our communities and in our connections with and to each other. For many the absence engendered by Covid beckons to the area of deepest aloneness, to the negative space of the most primal split.