Thinking today about the organisation of the October 2020 congress seems far away, as if a decade has passed. The global trauma of the pandemic thickens time. During a family therapy, an eight-year-old boy associated that whilst watching a documentary he saw people hugging each other, and asked “did that happen a long time ago?” It was as if the child's temporal representation referred to the age of the dinosaurs.

The 2020 International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (IACFP) congress was to be held in Panama, at a time when the whole world was beginning to know about the pandemic—the “syndémic”. As President of the Association, I had to find an alternative. But at the beginning it was difficult to move forward with my proposals because they did not elicit any reaction from my colleagues: silence was the only form of response.

I then realised the stupefying effect that the world was experiencing because of Covid-19 in its first variant. The fear of contagion and death led to