Editor's Comments

Time passes. Lockdowns begin to ease, in various ways, in a number of countries. At the time of writing, the talk is of the ‘new normal’; the very word ‘normal’ has a somehow lulling quality. Our first piece in this issue of the Journal takes us back some months, and reminds us of the shocking, early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Federica Facchin, writing as an analytic clinician, movingly describes the psychic impact of the virus in Northern Italy. She and I had been in correspondence over a peer review for the Journal, and an email from her - referencing the situation in Lombardy - led me to ask her if she might consider writing a short, subjective piece for the BJP on the issues she had touched on. The model for this in my mind was a brief and powerful, subjective account of New York on September 11 by the cultural theorist Toby Miller (Miller, 2002), which captured the frightening unfamiliarity of the day, before it could be understood.1 We are very grateful to Federica for her equally evocative, immersive ‘Letter from Northern Italy’; the narrative encompasses her own experiences and observations, clinical vignettes and the wider devastation in the region.

Complementing ‘“For Weeks Now It Has Been Evening”: A Letter from Northern Italy’ is our interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell, ‘Remote Working During The Pandemic’. Author of the influential Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Isaacs Russell, 2015), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Covid-19 Advisory Team, Isaacs Russell had been researching the use of technology for treatment for some years before Covid-19. She brings to bear her extensive knowledge of the recent cross-disciplinary and neuropsychological research on the digital setting, in considering whether an effective therapeutic process can occur without physical co-presence. She looks, with nuance and great sensitivity, at what happens to free association, evenly suspended att