You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Chair: Silvia Cantis Silberstein
Presenters: Reyna Cowan, Susana Ruth Merlo
Discussant: Judy K. Eekhoff
This engaging panel was introduced by Silvia Cantis Silberstein (Spain). Reyna Cowan (USA) and Susana Ruth Merlo (Argentina) presented papers with clinical material followed by a response paper by Judy K. Eekhoff (USA). These presenters are studying the impact of COVID-19 on the internal states of young children, and their ideas are sobering. Nonetheless, the clinical material imbues hopefulness by exemplifying how psychoanalytic work can improve the internal states of children trying to adapt to the reality of COVID-19. All three presenters underscore the pivotal role of the parent as a container for children’s anxieties and the impediments to containment presented by COVID-19.
Cowan argues that without sufficient containment by parents, intense annihilation anxieties emerge, including the fear of destruction of self and important others. She points out that the ordinary shifts from integrated to unintegrated states of mind seen in a child may become more frequent and severe. COVID-19 presents a serious challenge because a child can have dramatic increases in anxiety and have difficulty coping even with the help of parents. Given that COVID-19 is a collective experience, parents’ anxieties may get in the way of their capacity to be containing. Children may find alternative ways of coping including the concretization of fear around particular objects such as monsters, ghosts or spiders. Cowan gives other examples of the changed internal states of children including psychotic levels of anxiety, overproduction of ideas, precocity, and fears of aliveness versus deadness. Cowan’s clinical material helps us to see examples of the extraordinary anxiety she is trying to portray. She shows how primitive imagery of death and destruction can be consciously expressed rather than being disguised via derivatives.
Cowan’s paper also focuses on role of projective identification and p