Voices of psychoanalytic education

It is difficult to start writing anything these days without referencing the COVID-19 pandemic. The same goes for this Editorial. The way to the intermediate area of psychoanalytic writing is never a given, and now it has to pass from this new inexorable experience that involves loss. I do not mean only the huge loss of human lives – already a catastrophe. I am also referring to a large part to what in our relation to everyday life seemed a constant certainty. One could say that the bond with the environment-mother that represents our everyday experience now seems to a large extent dominated by uncertainty, if not fear, concerning fundamental aspects of it – health, even life itself, financial survival for many. This also holds for the now potentially dangerous link to others. In a message addressed to the members of the IFPS Juan Flores notes: “We can perceive the pandemic as something that attacks all that sustains and unites us with others” (Flores 2020). Psychoanalysts of course are also affected by this situation, as they not only have to deal with traumatic loss and fear in themselves, but also have to contain patients’ pain in an ad hoc frame striving to hold the multifaceted aspects of deep paranoid and depressive anxieties that are at work.

Yet psychoanalysis seems familiar with the pain and anxiety connected with plague and with the potential meanings of experience related to it. Wasn’t Freud himself deeply affected by the loss of his daughter Sophie, who died from complications of the Spanish flu epidemic on January 25, 1920? (Freud, Freud, & Grubrich-Simitis, 1985). In a letter to Sophie’s husband Max Halberstadt, Freud wrote on the same day:

You know how deep is our sorrow and we know how much you suffer … I will not try to console you … I am writing to you because we are not together and on this deplorable day of captivity we cannot meet and thus I cannot tell you what I keep repeating to her mother and her siblings – that it was an irrational, brutal b