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Let us start with the individual who needs a helpful and caring environment to start out in life. The strange and sudden discontinuity of birth may no be experienced consciously as frightening, but it may leave traces of a primordial and unavoidable distress. Similar situations of danger and anxiety will recur not only in childhood but also in later years and finally when the end of life seems in sight. As soon as the human being is capable of feeling a need, he learns to repeat that which helped at the start: cry and/or look for an object to stop or feed the need. Later, we often regard an authority as such an object. This is a person (for instance, a scientist or politician), who is expected to possess special knowledge or power, and ideally both, to solve the problem at hand.
To struggle in frightening circumstances and to search for protective agents who offer an exit from them is a familiar plight due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Stopping the pandemic is a universal aim, but individuals and authorities vacillate regarding exactly how this can be achieved. This wavering provokes additional plights and further struggles. Perhaps this dire situation is still too close and the exit still too uncertain and far away, so that we tend to avoid the feelings it provokes. Troubles often come, but as soon as they burst into our life, it becomes difficult to fully believe in these troubles, Camus suggests in his most renowned novel The Plague.
If we want to grasp the distressing experience of helplessness not only rationally but fully - which means also emotionally - we need an accompanying experience or memory allowing us the right distance, that can be summoned without mobilising all our defences to cloud everything. In this delicate task a Franz Kafka parable might help. The parable concerns a man wandering in an unknown milieu, coming upon an authority who elicits by his profession of a policeman an expectation of aid.1 This expectation will not be fulfilled. The parable con