Inscrutable to Myself

Human connection arguably is the bedrock of psychoanalysis, and through that connection we engage in interesting conversations, as Adam Phillips says, and then we see what happens (2013). (In this light, symptoms are simply entry points.) This sense of connection, real or hoped-for, is the fabric of our work, and if growth is to be had, however that might be defined, it is that lingering sense of connection, present or past, that provides the scaffolding for it. Our recent pandemic has challenged our psychoanalytic bonds, and yes, perhaps in some instances deepened them.

I find zoom connection wearisome, a simulacrum of the in-the-flesh connections with others I’ve come to value and respect over the last forty years. Paradoxically, I much prefer the phone. That’s for many reasons, not the least of which is that I can focus better on the real person “in front of me” without having to be distracted by them. The phone frees up more of the reverie part of my mind, which I have found is useful to me and to my patients.

How strange that we might long for human connection, and then find such encounters now, when enacted in the flesh, tainted with fear, suspicion, and even aversion. My friend (or my patient) is my potential death sentence, or maybe at least a preface to getting really, really sick, or, maybe, nothing to worry about. That’s the tension, we couldn’t really know until it was too late. And I cannot imagine sitting across from a patient now, both of us wearing masks (or worse, separated by plexiglass). Don’t we wear enough masks as it is, those we aim to remove? Isn’t there enough plexiglass already, the kind that prevents us from ever really knowing another’s actual lived experience? The paper mask somehow concretizes this, and I think it would be comedic, though perhaps physically lifesaving, to conduct a therapy with them. Who knows?

This elevates Sartre’s general feeling about the dangers of relationships to the level of hilarity. He thought, with some exceptio