The Case of J: Returning to the Office

I thank the editor for inviting me back to serve as a discussant in this second of a two-part series of sessions on working during the pandemic, and I thank the analyst, Dr Y, for her largesse in once again sharing her work and permitting us to learn from it. As I did with the first set of sessions (Ehrlich 2020b), I received this second set as an invitation to share how this psychoanalytic process affected me and how my responses might be relevant in illuminating what is intrinsic in analysis: transference/counter-transference blind spots and enactments.

In her introduction to this set of sessions, Dr Y summarises her experience of the analytic process in the months when she and J met on the phone as follows:

During the following 14 months voice was the only available source of emotional information. Initially, the hours on the phone had a strange eeriness, a hard to describe sense of loneliness. I was often aware of a sense of relief at the end of the hour. With the passing months the eeriness seemed to give way to frustration, which was at times overlooked as it seemed to have become a part of an uncomfortable “new normal” … We were often reminded of what we were missing: Loss of a sense of humanness that we could experience in the room, together. Interestingly, these challenges of remote work seemed to also disappear for extended periods of time only to abruptly appear at unexpected times, reminding both of us that this “new normal” was not the way we liked to work.

With this evocative description, Dr Y invites us into an analytic atmosphere dominated by a sense of derealization and dissociation. The passive tone in “the hours … had a strange eeriness” and “the eeriness … was at times overlooked” compellingly suggests that the analyst/patient dyad experienced this disturbing atmosphere as fated, inevitable, and justified by the loss of being “in the room, together”. Dr. Y.’s description of the “uncomfortable ‘new normal’” and “hard to describe sens