You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I have in treatment several people who went through long periods of self-quarantine, long before the coronavirus crisis: for months, sometimes years, they never left home. If they lived alone, they would go out only for groceries or to go to the post office. If they had a job, they gave it up; if they were students, they interrupted their studies. (Some applied for universal basic income payments, which in my opinion encouraged their syndrome.) It's a syndrome without a name—it may be referred to as agoraphobia, but in fact these people are not generally afraid of open spaces; they're afraid of others, of the crowd around them, pushing and shoving. I would call them claustrophiles, stealing the term from my mentor in psychoanalysis, Elvio Fachinelli, author of the 1983 book Claustrofilia.
Years ago, a now mature woman was afraid of contracting AIDS on buses by holding on to the hanging straps.
Others stay at home out of hypochondria: they feel besieged by death and espy every sensation or physiological symptom as the signal of some fatal pathology. One patient, who spent months locked at home alone, would collect his urine in small transparent pots, line them up on a long shelf, and contemplate them for hours, studying any changes in color and trying to interpret what terrible illnesses these changes might be signaling.
Others—labeled seriously obsessive-compulsive subjects—are afraid of others (and of objects, insofar as they are shared with others) as ever present sources of infection. When they do go out, they wear gloves and try to prevent anyone touching them. They can by no means use the bathroom in other people's homes or, of course, in public places. In some cases they always stand, even at work, to avoid any contact with a chair.