Ours

Freud invented an indispensable term, nachträglich, to describe the relationship between and our struggle to respond to that which was unforeseen. We are collectively being transformed by an experience that has a multitude of dimensions, while at the same time, the aftermath remains unknown. The substrate of anxiety is evident in all of our emotional responses to our varied experiences. Our social links and the institutions and platforms that support them are vital in preserving the sense that our destiny is, as it always is, entwined with the Other.

The practice of listening to the unconscious, of encountering the psychic apparatus of denial and censorship, reveals something astonishing—each individual responds to the confrontation with their mortality, the limits of existence, in a singular way.

The one element of consistency is our dependency on the fantasms with which we have framed our earliest experiences of vulnerability. Freud's often praised essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915/1957) might be translated for this moment along the lines of “Thoughts in a Time of Collective Vulnerability.” Many of Freud's insights in that essay remain pertinent to this new and different time of war and death. Perhaps with such a confrontation with death as the COVID-19 pandemic has produced, we can reassess the subtlety of Freud's reflection on the place of death in human experience. From his concern for losing his sons, he forged a meditation on the psychic pain that occurs when the scale of death becomes incomprehensible and impossible to mourn.

In our moment, we are experiencing the unprecedented consequences of trying to make sense of social links during an explosion, an air raid of information. Our society requires such social links provided by texts, discourses, and visual narratives, but their psychic value is being destroyed as quickly as they are created. They are often destroyed as a consequence of a lack of understanding of the relationship between inf