“Community Response to the Impact of Covid: Psychoanalytic Crisis Intervention with a Couple”, by Elizabeth Palacios

This case is a paradigmatic example of one of the most common and difficult effects of the pandemic shutdown: the abrupt loss of previous defensive strategies and ways of coping leading to a complete breakdown. Couples who rely on action-oriented manic defences are vulnerable to relationship disintegration when abruptly blocked from taking action due to external limitations. The sudden interruption of these manic defences forces couples to fall back on paranoid-schizoid and projective mechanisms.

Four things stood out for me in the description of this case:

1. The severity and violence of the breakdown of the relationship

2. The description of their pre-Covid relationship as ideal, and without any sense of what makes being in a relationship difficult

3. The overwhelming presence of shame and narcissistic vulnerability

4. The constant regression to merger; the sense that only one person could be present at any moment. Attention has to be absolute and understanding perfect; there is no room for two people, two minds, or keeping someone in mind whilst attending to something else.

The couple's description of their pre-Covid relationship as ideal, without any sense of the inherent difficulties of being in a relationship, is a red-flag indicator of the lack of a containing couple relationship or of any coping capacity beyond evacuative and projective defences. I am always concerned when couples describe their relationship this way as it indicates a stunted or non-existent capacity for confronting and processing difference, otherness, loss, and mourning. Being in a relationship inherently involves confrontation with another person with whom life is shared and yet who ineluctably has disturbingly different needs, perspectives, and desires. Previously, this couple seemed to function by spending a lot of time apart and then uniting in an illusory merger when they were together. Without working through difference and intense conflict, evoked by paranoid-schizoid states in fluctuatio