Corona Virus, Social Distancing, and the Body in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Now fills the air so many a haunting shape, That no one knows how best he may escape.-Goethe, Faust, Part 2 T he hauntings evoked by Freud (1901) seem to have become a concrete reality in the presence of the Covid-19 virus, which appears to be infectious even up to a distance of several meters and persists in the air or on surfaces. The current state of the pandemic has had an extraordinary emotional impact on everyone, including ourselves and our analysands. The situation we are living in today presents a special opportunity in which remote interactivity and technological instruments can help us keep the psychoanalytic experience and research active. Reaching our analysands in atypical locations with respect to a normal analytic context-their homes, offices, vehicles-allows us to immerse ourselves "up to our necks" in their most intimate anxieties: an immersion that can occur only in the most fortunate and productive psychoanalytic moments. Hence we are able more than ever to access the pulsating core of the unconscious by entering directly into the emotional density of life's situations. The body-mind dissociation that threatens the roots of mental life, today more than in the past (Lombardi 2017), becomes more difficult in the current context, in which the body and its state of well-being are constantly called into question and developing a capacity for bodily concern is required for our personal survival (Lombardi 2018, 2019). As

Sixteen analysands' and large groups' reactions to the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…This patient made a statement identical to what was said by one of Ricardo Lombardi's patients in Italy. Lombardi (2020) writes that after starting distant communication, this patient remarked that if the treatment had stopped, all they had achieved up to that point would be lost, and treatment would require restarting analysis from the beginning once the pandemic passed.…”