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The present issue was borne of a desire to capture the sentiments of particular moments over the past five months. The process of procuring, editing, and producing a collection of responses made manifest the aporias familiar to psychoanalytic practice. Thus, writing, editing, and publishing can echo the encounters with unconscious processes in clinical work.
Initially, the issue aimed to seize something of the unrelenting hilflosigkeit (helplessness) experienced by clinicians under the lapping waves of the coronavirus. Contributors submitted responses from a particular time and place, in the singular moment in which they drafted their reflections. And yet, to edit and publish necessarily involve an introduction of duration — often several months - and suspension of what felt incredibly urgent. This particular impasse has a long history in psychoanalysis, with resonances in Freud's logic of afterwardness and deferral (nachträglichkeit). It echoes with the clinical question of how the urgency of a particular moment or event is sustained or not, given the frame of a treatment with its presumed consistency, predictability, and duration across time.
Then, on May 25th George Floyd was murdered, memorialized in an amateur video depicting violence that was stunning in its