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.
This paper examines the impact of the pandemic on both the author’s subjectivity, and the intersubjectivity of dyadic work. The prevailing mood of futility is well-captured by Albert Camus in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Here Camus introduces the idea of absurdity, exemplified by our own unthinkable cosmic mortality or finitude. In this paper, absurdity is seen as a symbolic death, or traumatic loss, a temporal collapse into re-experienced despair or overwhelm. The stresses of COVID are shown to evoke a return to archaic overburdening and threatened loss of selfhood, reminiscent of the author’s upbringing as a “parentified” child in an alcoholic surround, which resulted in an affective quarantining, provoked again in current clinical entanglements. The end of personal office visits, with some patients halting treatment altogether, become Sisyphean losses for the author, and a threat to developmental strivings, both personal and professional. Patients are also shaken by the loss of intimate contact, along with other losses undermining to relationality. Such jarring finitude, uncertainty, and loss are viewed here through the lens of phenomenological-contextualism. Clinical vignettes are presented against the pandemic’s backdrop, as the stresses and shocks experienced by the analyst become a window into patients’ dread and overwhelm, leading to expansions of the analytic alliance.