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I admire and celebrate the readiness of the many therapists who joined the APM commission to offer their expertise to treat urgent family and individual situations during the pandemic in Spain. An example of their work is that with the couple presented here. For them, as for so many of us, the world we knew was drastically changed by Covid lockdowns, and we did not readily have the tools or the means to deal with this new reality. From one day to the next, this couple lost their roles in society: Irma as a wedding planner and Ramiro as the owner of a new restaurant in charge of several employees. They do not know if this will ever end. Irma, seeking help, wrote that she was ready to pack up and leave Ramiro to go back to her parental home. In my understanding, she is suffering the loss of her familiar couple home and is fleeing to a fantasised, protective one; paradoxically, the very unsatisfying home that during the couple's interviews she called crazy.
The pandemic changed the context of this couple's planned future entirely. They both experienced a deep loss of work connections that sustained their identities. In normal circumstances, each configuration of linking creates new inscriptions and new identities, expanding the self (Berenstein, 2004, 2008). This is what Irma and Ramiro have lost. Dispossessed of their societal roles, of what Puget et al. (1988) called their trans-subjective space, they no longer recognise each other in their coupledom. In other words, Irma and Ramiro have lost their mutual internal representation (Pichon-Rivière, 1970) or couple representation (Puget & Berenstein, 1988). The result of mutual recognition of their coupling is the creation of an unconscious common narrative, a protective and mutual skin ego (Anzieu, 1986). My co-author and I have called this the “couple world” with an unconscious beyond their individual ones, with goals, ideals, commitments, and narratives that innovatively recreate each partner's earliest and most intima