Prologue: Psychoanalyzing the Apocalypse

A few years ago, I toyed with the idea of writing something on climate change. I wondered how this gigantic issue relates to psychoanalysis, which I see as concerning itself with the individual mind and lived experience, not with changing the social order, however urgent it feels to do such a thing. But for some reason, I continued to think about the idea. I gradually realized why the idea stayed with me. For the last 75 years, we have been living in the shadow of apocalypse: a threat of nuclear Armageddon during the cold war, a threat of cascading environmental catastrophe in more recent years. The end of the world has been on the edge of our consciousness for two generations now. I thought psychoanalysis would have a lot to say about the phenomena of a looming apocalypse, but I let the idea float around in my mind without making it a project. Then, Covid-19 hit us. For the first time ever, we were in the midst of a disaster threatening everyone in the universe at once. It seemed the perfect time to bring some thoughtful analysts together to figure out what this phenomenon was all about. I thought at first to edit an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry with the apocalypse as its subject. But I knew that would take many months. Then, I toyed with the idea of putting together a round-table discussion to be offered as a Zoom webinar. But so much was happening so quickly. We would need time to make sense of this period of constant flux qua a period of constant flux. I decided to create an online e-mail “roundtable” conversation to proceed over a 6-week period. I imagined that this project would be a kind of virtual “Decameron,” except instead of diverting each other with fabulous stories of different times and places, as with those medieval Florentine refugees, we would analyze the plague itself and what we were going through. Soon I was able to gather together a group of nine analysts, all of whom, in one way or another, had already begun to think about the subject. These