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COVID-19 has hit Italy with full impact. It hammered down on our land like an unexpected, massive meteorite, disrupting us while we were sleeping. The apparently stable soil under our feet has been shaken so violently that we felt like being bounced in the air and suspended in an unknown void. There we have been left, floating like astronauts, well confined in our protective but segregating space suits, unable to touch each other and trying not to breathe the same infected air.
Sadly the virus went on spreading its destructive vibrations like an earthquake, provoking a global tsunami ready to flood other countries in a lethal devastation. The results were a worldwide medical emergency, a collective trauma and an unprecedented feeling of helplessness and uncertainty.
After what I felt being a strange kind of flu, I decided to put myself in physical isolation. Being a potential carrier and contagion threat evoked a sense of separation and alienation, as if a cold, invisible glass wall had been posed between me and others, a feeling which seemed to
have become collective. People on the streets reflexively started to distance themselves like frightened animals, avoiding even eye contact.
In this odd isolation I found a beautiful refuge and relational home in the recent IARPP forum, where countless voices intimately shared what was emerging in our inner and outer world: impotence, fear, but also hope. A kind of psychoanalytic emergency task force generated itself and came into being. We were collectively weaving a meaning-making multicolored safety net, preventing us from falling, and a warming blanket, a big, protecting and connecting “Third“, helping us to cope.
Back to my virtual practice I knew I couln’t hide my inner turmoil and I realized that the implicit communication would make its way even through the screens. Surprisingly I discovered a new way of “feeling human among other human beings,” a twinship experience first articulated by Kohut and beautifully reconsid