Commentary: The therapist

It has been a challenging year to be working as psychotherapists. Our personal lives – our hopes, fears, yearnings, anxieties, strengths and weak spots – have inevitably bled into our work this year. We, together with our patients, have had to face an entirely new situation, posing key questions: how do we manage our daily lives, look after our families, yet at the same time be there for our patients? How do we absorb minor and major traumas, which sometimes have come at a dizzying pace, without losing our composure too much?

Sebastian Kohon’s words echoed with me: ‘what would it be like if a sighted group of visitors were forced to navigate this event [in the dark] with a clueless guide who had no experience of managing without sight?’ This year, we have indeed felt at times like clueless guides, frantically trying to process and digest what has often felt impossible to fully take in, at a pace that would allow us to both look after ourselves and attend to our patients.

The selection of papers that follows offers a glimpse into the minds and lives of child psychotherapists during this first year of Covid. What has it been like to face so many rapid changes, so much loss, so many adjustments to the setting? We have hardly had time to stand still and take stock this year, and these papers offer an opportunity to do so.

In my case, as a psychotherapist working with adolescents whom I sometimes had to see in person during the lockdowns, I recall my initial feelings of agitation when some of them refused to wear masks. The complex and guilt-inducing question of seeing some young people face-to-face, while others are not seen, entails frustrating and unsatisfying choices. Nikolas Antoniades’ paper, coming from Cyprus, illustrates the dilemmas involved in such decisions. I related to his thoughts: ‘I started feeling guilty about making these choices … as if I was breaking some ethical law, or indeed breaking the Law’.

Working some of the time in person, for me, involved both