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This evocative book outlines the thoughts and feelings, in diary form, of two Italian psychoanalysts during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic: Angelo Antonio Moroni from the perspective of having to incorporate lockdown and working online into his private practice, alongside the impact of the pandemic on himself and his family; and Pietro Roberto Goisis from the perspective of being hospitalized with COVID-19 at the beginning of March 2020. The two parts are written very differently and the jointly authored introduction emphasizes these differences:
…the two diaries share a … graphic account of how …the epidemic forced Italian psychanalysts to reconsider … analytical “asymmetry” and “neutrality” - two different, but complementary points of view. (2)
The introduction also details a brief trajectory of the COVID-19 virus in Italy. I found myself taking note of the number of references to “first” - the first cases, the first confirmed death, the first “patient zero”, the first European country to be impacted - and wondered about reading something composed “in the moment” during March to July 2020 from the vantage point of 2023, having now a multitude of thoughts and feelings from my own experiences of working as an analyst during lockdown in a different country.
Moroni’s account spans ninety-one days, comprising free association to the events of his day as well as to the wider world. The shock of the unfolding situation, both personally and professionally, comes through in his entries for the first fifteen days or so. His language attests to this: the “battleground”, “I feel traumatised”, “war memories”, “medicine can do nothing” all feature on Day One (5).
I was struck by Moroni’s (perhaps) unconscious gender descriptions - the “hysterical nurses”, “hysterical mothers with children at home” (9), a doctor “who tells me that her mind is ‘too full’” (6, emphasis added), a male doctor patient of Moroni’s tells him that “a nurse doesn’t want … to work as she is tired of