Psychoanalysis and the Pandemic: Editor's Introduction

Tarrou had some comments on the sermon by Paneloux: “I can understand that type of fervor and find it not displeasing. At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth—-in other words, to silence. So let's wait.”

—Albert Camus, The Plague

As Camus suggests, in times of rapid or traumatic social change there is always a risk of speaking too soon because the “propensity for rhetoric” is great. At JAPA, with the world in the thick of a pandemic, we decided to take that risk and not stay silent. Back in late March we sent out a call for writing that describes aspects of what is happening for psychoanalytically oriented clinicians and their patients in the time of Covid-19. For many of us, chronological time, strangely, seems to have both sped up and slowed way down, as the days all roll mournfully into one another. The choreography of movement and talk that gave sense and color to a typical workday has suddenly stopped. Thankfully, out of this collective stasis and trauma have emerged writings of unusual vitality and poignancy that we have culled for this section of JAPA. We received any number of remarkable documents from a variety of practitioners, working in a variety of settings, who have given serious thought to their role and experience as the pandemic takes its course.

It is tempting to sing the praises of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in times like these—-an unfortunate example, perhaps, of not heeding Camus's caution regarding our propensity for rhetoric. In fact, in a pandemic the role of psychoanalysis—-as both a theoretical point of view and a clinical practice—-is one that ought to be debated, and there have been such debates taking place in various listservs and online