Thoughts on Covid, Hamlet, and Freedom

Several Latin baseball players have been credited with the phrase “baseball ’been very very good to me.” These include Roberto Clemente and Sammy Sosa. But it seems the phrase originated with Minnie Minoso, the first black player on the Chicago White Sox, and my favorite player as a kid. Most people would not say this about COVID-19. Most people would describe COVID as an ill wind that blows nobody good. But this I think would be a mistake. In many ways COVID has improved the lives of psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and patients.

Before COVID treatment was conducted nearly exclusively in our offices. Treatment on-line or by phone was done, but such cases weren’t much talked about among colleagues and weren’t acceptable for purposes of training. This meant that patients had to reside in the city their therapist or analyst lived in and had to change therapists whenever they or their therapist moved. And patients were often told not to move if they wanted to get well, and that moving for even the most compelling of reasons was a resistance to the treatment. Seeing a therapist in her office also meant that a forty-five minute session might take three or four hours given commuting times and cost a great deal more than the cost of the session given parking, gas and lost time at work.

COVID changed all of that. The powers that be who refused to credit on-line cases for training and insisted such treatment wasn’t real were suddenly doing it (exclusively!) themselves and finding that although they might prefer working in person, on-line treatment was undeniably real. And because patients were seen in their homes and analysts in their homes, the experience of treatment radically changed. Analysts immediately became more human, more like their patients. More time was spent face to face, often all treatment time was face to face, and patients got to know their analysts far more as people like themselves whose kids might interrupt a session or who might have to interrupt it thems