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An unfathomable scenario – a global pandemic – impacts psychoanalysis – the consultation, confidentiality, the felt intimacy, the predictability, the startling “moments” and the affective engagement. As a field known for its glacially slow change process, we were impacted as if struck by a meteor.
Can we remember the events of those initial weeks and months?
It is not surprising that everyone clamors to recount those moments and days when the realization or rather trauma hit. We all tell and re-tell those moments, as we do with traumatic events, in the service of mastery and perhaps healing.
Remember the feelings?
In New York City, on March 13, 2020, the music, the noise and as Amy Joelson (this issue), one of our authors notes, for child and adolescent psychotherapists, the play stopped. The “shutdown” took place on the eve of many Spring Break school vacations. So many clinical dyads bid goodbye for two weeks, anticipating or hoping for a resumption of connection at the end of “break.” As the full scope of what a pandemic meant, as professional identity and even existence were called into question, the lack of preparation sent everyone scrambling.
Abrupt, destabilizing and frightening, the COVID-19 virus and the resulting global pandemic reconfigured, and I might assert, forever altered our clinical approach – logistically and theoretically. “Lockdowns,” “social distancing,” “masking” and toy washing were suddenly part and parcel of the child/adolescent clinical exchange. Hoping to limit “transmission” of the virus, clinicians were, at times required and at other times urged to follow medical? governmental? common sense?, guidelines around how we “see patients.” So, as clinicians, we found ourselves participating in a lightening fast, experientially disorienting, move to the “virtual” or “remote” consultation room – the ‘Zoom Room.’ This phrase, and many others, expanded and became newly embedded in the clinical lexicon. The move to “remote,” a word that is the antithe