Lessons from the Pandemic: Part 1. Editor’s Introduction

Many months ago, soon after COVID-19 took hold in North America, I put out a call to members of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly community to try to observe the changes associated with the pandemic, with the hope that we could find some valuable lessons for psychoanalytic thought and practice from the events that had already caused much harm. Over the next few months, with the input of my Associate Editors, the project grew to include the many disturbances that stemmed from the precarious political moment, as well as from the pandemic itself. In this issue, we see the first group of thoughtful and incisive papers that resulted. The second group will appear in the April 2022 issue of the Quarterly.

Past historical events that surely reverberated through the psychoanalytic community have often failed to find broad expression in the analytic literature. World War II, for example, was represented by only a few articles and book reviews in the Quarterly, exploring wartime stress and fugue states (Fisher 1945; Jones 1945; Ross 1948) and the nature of the propaganda issued by both totalitarian and democratic states (Kris 1943; Saul 1942).

And pandemics have been much less written about, in any genre, than wars. In Pale Rider (2017), a study of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic and its inscription in memory, Spinney observes that, although the so-called Spanish flu killed at least 50,000,000 people across the globe—many more than the number claimed by the First World War—the pandemic has left few testaments in literature or elsewhere, in contrast with the vast literature emanating from the war. Spinney attributes this difference in part to the footprint of each of the events in space and

time; the war was geographically focused and extended for four years, and it was possible to create the kind of unfolding narrative that permits us to remember. The Spanish flu, however, invaded the entire world in an unimaginably short time: