Lessons from the Pandemic: Part 2. Editor's Introduction

In this issue, we continue with the papers commissioned over a year ago with the intent of learning from the pandemic and the turbulent political and social circumstances that accompanied it. When this project was in its planning stages, it seemed particularly important to take time to explore the analytic ramifications of our situation. Changes were occurring very rapidly, with analysts forsaking their offices and treating patients remotely—and on a broader canvas, encountering uncertain threats to their safety and that of others. In a situation of shared trauma, changes in analytic work may or may not be optimal, but there was little time to consider them. We hoped that the long timescale of the project would permit authors to take a “second look” (Baranger, W., Baranger, M., and Mom, J. 1983) at the shifts that had occurred. Indeed, many of the papers do show that authors have done this. Planning so far ahead, we also held the confident expectation that the pandemic already would have ended when this issue was published. This proved not to be the case; the pandemic is ongoing; changes in the social surround may be lasting; and we are left to ask ourselves, as Wheeler Vega does in his paper, whether the changes we have wrought in the analytic situation are best seen as a revolution with the emergence of new paradigms or as resistance to analytic work.

Two of the papers in this group continue the debate about the sudden change in analytic circumstances brought about by the onset of the pandemic. Looking at the evolution of analytic practice, both Abbasi and Wheeler Vega question the wisdom of the smooth transition that

analysts made to new circumstances. Abbasi considers the countertransference motives that may push analysts to move quickly to remote work. Her paper contains a rich analysis of the complex countertransferences and past experiences that underpinned the technical choices that she made.

On a more