You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Already in the title of her presentation, Elizabeth Palacios invites us to stay alert. She asks us to be vigilant about the possible dangers that this young couple faced due to the pandemic, which she defines later on as a violent environmental intrusion. Next, she presents a quote from the book The Expulsion of the Other by Byung-Chul Han (2018), the South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and cultural theorist. This author contends that in today's digital world we are witnessing an accumulation of acquaintances and “likes” which prevent encounters with anything “other” than ourselves. There are no true encounters, much less real give-and-take, as these are being replaced by self-advertisement loops between interchangeable beings. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this describes a society that has become increasingly individualistic, egocentric, and narcissistic, in which individuals are prone to establish symbiotic bonds.
In brief, the quotation selected by Elizabeth about civilisation—which can be understood as the efforts whereby drive's maturation allows human beings to become progressively more civilised, kind, and welcoming to “the other”—seems to be used by her to announce that, in her view, and related to their confinement, this couple had lost some degree of civility. Precisely, because it has been imposed on them to live with the different, or “other” for an extremely long and uninterrupted period of time.
Certainly, our ability to coexist with each other in a civilised manner has been tested during these pandemic times due to its increased requirements in terms of emotional processing. The pandemic complicates everyday life situations. We are prevented from acting the way we used to. Our ability to postpone and tolerate frustration is tested by new challenges. Under these circumstances, when frustration becomes extreme and the future appears too difficult to predict, the most primitive aspects of our personality tend to emerge.
As couple therapists, thi