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Covid-19 has torn through the fabric of our personal and professional lives. To make sense of this catastrophe, we are gifted with Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life: Common Distress, Individual Experience. Edited by Howard B. Levine and Ana de Staal, and translated into English, French, and Portuguese, this timely book brings together fifteen authors from diverse theoretical orientations and cultural backgrounds to reflect upon the pandemic's impact on psychoanalytic practice. This creative approach attests to the resilience of the human mind by “thinking under fire” whilst in lockdown and considering ways that “psychoanalysis lives and thinks within its times”.
Impressively, this research project was conceived near the beginning of the pandemic. Analysts from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States have investigated its revolutionary impacts by elucidating group processes within institutional and sociopolitical contexts and studying the phenomena of distance-mediated treatment. Several authors examine the ways in which the pandemic has altered the analytic frame. They offer hypotheses to understand the complex traumatic narrative that is unfolding. The book considers the strain the pandemic has placed on the analytic method whilst inspiring the reader to imagine a new mode of analytic practice in the future.
The first two chapters describe the contextual backdrop of Covid-19. Christopher Bollas examines how the pandemic reveals and expresses a collective mental health crisis in which psychotic and sociopathic group processes threaten democratic freedom of thought and speech. Recognising the dangers of anarchy, Bollas makes a plea for reform of democracies by calling attention to the “serial lying” that attacks the capacity of the populace to apprehend and process reality. Michael Rustin underscores the significance of “containment” and the ways “containing” structures have collapsed, leading to the emergence of primitive defences and regression t