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Firstly, I would like to thank the clinician who has generously and bravely shared their work and the three commentators whose different responses provide us with other lenses through which we draw our own understanding. In the first lockdown of 2020, I found myself reading Kobo Abe's 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes in which we learn the fate of a man who finds himself trapped in a hole in the sand dunes in a coastal region of Japan. Every day is apparently the same; he battles in vain against the constant influx of sand which gets everywhere, into every orifice, of both the man and the woman he finds himself imprisoned with. The repetition, the sense of stuckness, as well as the futility of this daily routine may be compared with some of the views of the commentators below. Associations made to the material link us to the pandemic and Long COVID, the tyranny of endless zoom, and life ‘on remote’. Like the flow of sand, the subject's isolation and the endless repetition, the ‘Groundhog Day’ and the claustrophobia are explored in the commentaries. Abe's novel ends with a particular twist. The reader discovers that it is through his internal world that the protagonist no longer feels trapped and the longed-for concrete means to do this therefore becomes obsolete. In the same way the three commentators might wonder what needs to shift for this patient to do the same.
I would like to thank Ann Scott and the British Journal of Psychotherapy's Editorial Board for giving me the opportunity to continue a section of the Journal which has been running since 1984. Taking over a role like this during a pandemic has been challenging and I am grateful to my predecessors for their advice and encouragement.
Katya Orrell
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