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The “other” has to be created before it can be perceived (Milner, 1969, p. 404)
For most, it seems, Covid came and Covid went. But for me, Covid is still very much alive, present in its absence. We’ve had no choice but to move on, to live.
And yet.
There is a hole ripped in the knitted together fabric of our shared human narrative, a blank spot we strive valiantly to cover over with meaningful activity and connection. This blank spot is the darkest recess of the primal split.
In adult onset trauma, the process of meaning-making, underwritten by the good object comes under attack, leaving a meaningless void that cannot be filled (Laub, 2005). Covid was a trauma of loneliness, of absence, the absence of the good mother, a trauma of no-one-ness.
But, for those who suffered traumatic, early neglect, Covid recapitulated an old wound, the nameless dread of nonexistence. Before the split into good and bad, prior to even the split into deadness and aliveness, there is the most primal split into existence and nonexistence based on the reliable presence or absence of the primary caretaker (Winnicott, 1945). Speaking of early neglect, Green (1997) wrote that for some patients, “the non-existence, will become, at some point, the only thing that is real” (p. 1082). In this case, the absence of the object is more psychically real than its presence, and this void becomes a protected space of non-being inside, inhibiting the elaboration of internal objects, undoing authentic relating to self and other (Sopher, 2018).
And now I am back in my analyst’s office for the first time.
She wears a mask. I do not.
I lost hold of you inside, I tell her.