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In this short paper, I want to examine the function, and a number of ethical and clinical dilemmas, in deciding to continue to work in the consulting room with an 18-year-old boy during the first Covid-19 lockdown in Cyprus. This patient displayed a borderline organisation of the schizoid type, with a marked false self presentation. To understand this work, I build on Winnicott’s theories, as well as Monica Lanyado’s ideas. Lanyado explores how the presence of the therapist and that of the therapy itself acquire functions beyond those commonly defined within the psychoanalytic framework – in this case, due to the nature of the collectively experienced phenomenon of the lockdown. Local circumstances, restrictions and realities in Cyprus are described, as they occurred at the time of the first Covid-19 lockdown, showing how the patient’s pathology became intertwined with the above conflicts and dilemmas that I faced as his psychotherapist, and as a fellow member of the local and global society. I argue that under such unusual conditions, psychotherapist and patient become part of the same local and global collective, and only if they work ‘hand in hand’ can they survive a collectively experienced trauma, at a time when most human contact was forbidden by law.