Distrust, Panic and Denial … or Hope?

How, in this pandemic, is the issue of trust versus mistrust emerging from a different dynamic than the development model that shapes psychoanalytic understanding? How is the panic we are encountering in our tele-sessions different than the panic disorder we have learned to diagnose? How is denial spreading like the virus among certain sub-populations of our nation? What is contributing to the dissemination of this denial?

In offering a vision of the history of psychoanalysis, emphasizing the social activism of Freud and those analysts emerging around him, Gaztambide (2019) introduces a way to understand the phenomenon of distrust different from traditional understandings of developmental trauma. Gaztambide focuses on “the erosion of the capacity for trust and empathy between individuals and communities”:

With greater inequality, people are less caring of one another, there is less mutuality in relationships, people have to fend for themselves and get what they can.— so, inevitably, there is less trust. (2019, p. 161)

As care for others erodes, distrust spreads. It takes little awareness to note waning trust in our current government, in our health-care system to be optimally responsive to illness, in our economic system to hold in the face of a pandemic strain. Patients wonder out loud if they will be protected by their employers. Will they be fired? Will they be compensated? Will they be exposed to a deadly virus?

Patients are showing increasing signs of stress as they increase their work time at home, as they hypervigilently scan their peers and superiors for cues of confidence or abandonment. Can they trust

others? Can they trust themselves? Many patients are not trusting their own capacity to sustain an income to afford rents, to feed and protect themselves and families impacted by this pandemic.

We attend to distrust in others and ourselves, shaped by a social system of economic and political relationships valorizing competition over cooperation, self-preservat