Letters from Lockdown

Hello friends,

It's so good to be able to communicate with you on the current difficulties and all the matters concerned with COVID-19.

I have been working in my consulting room in Kraków, Poland, for the last week and plan to continue with my patients by telephone or online. I do my best to consider this an opportunity to become closer to my patients.

I think we both come into contact with something through the “contact barrier” or thanks to the contact barrier and the virus.

I feel I have been able to construct with the patients who decided to continue (because not all of them have decided to continue in remote analysis) a “laboratory” for the “vaccine against the virus” to help develop our mental immune system. And as we know, constructing a laboratory for the vaccine, we need the virus and we need a specific setting which keeps us safe. All this work is very lively because of the idea of being possibly exposed and infected by the patient, who may have contact with someone. Or me infecting the patient because of my being infected with such a virus by someone “out there.”

So this is all there, and the patient may have been infected by some foreign body or a bad object, but I may have been the same.

But come to think of it, I may have been infected by my supervisor who, by chance, is an analyst living in Milan. This “infection” may be in fact a healing possibility—that we get infected by functional thoughts and experiences of our supervisors who have undergone this wave of mutilation.

So I feel lucky to be able to discuss these issues with someone living in a very difficult situation—just like with this group here!

As I worked with my patients this week, my thoughts went to how they may be able to “infect” us with something, but maybe they can also bring in something vital, something truly emotional. It's just like the children—now we know through scientific findings and statistical analysis that children go through this disease relatively unharmed, and obviously this does