Psychoanalysis in the Time of Coronavirus: From an Onboard Logbook During the Pandemic

During the lockdown, we, as analysts, had to face new situations, which disrupted our habitual mode of working and challenged our ability to adapt. I discovered that having a supportive relationship among colleagues became more important than ever. I will discuss the influence that the transition from in-presence sessions to the online modality during the pandemic has had on the therapeutic process and setting. The adoption of new relational working procedures instead of the usual in-person session has revived the centrality of those themes having to do with the body and sensoriality in psychoanalysis, including the possibility of recognizing and integrating dissociated embodied traumatic experiences, ones that are non-verbalized, and not able to be verbalized. I will outline a clinical case to detail the difficulties encountered in my clinical practice, in which the contingency strategy, based on working remotely, continued to guarantee that sense of security necessary to enable the possibility of dreaming together and freely exploring – introducing, however, within the relationship, aspects of Ferenczi and Rank’s “active technique,” which would not have occurred in person, and which certainly impacted the process in a different way, while always permitting the identification and assimilation of dissociated experiences.