Cytokine Storm

Broadly speaking, “cytokine storm” is a cascade of exaggerated immune responses that can cause serious problems.

Bion said that when two people meet, an emotional storm is created. What are the possible cytokine-emotional storms when two people cannot meet? Can they be felt in mutuality still without an individual breakdown?

This so-called “cytokine storm” has been occupying my mind throughout the pandemic. On hearing of people dying within two weeks of a confirmed COVID-19 infection, I felt terrible. A lot of my patients and friends have lost someone close in these personal storms. And all we could do was keep a safe distance and watch what was happening to them as the storms on earth consumed them.

Witnessing from a distance is not easy. It's as though one is locked in a spaceship and can do nothing.

Others are down there, are physically closer, but they are locked in their tanks on the battlefield.

Perhaps it is an anecdote I heard or dreamt of that Wilfred Bion was with a team in a tank caught in enemy fire, and all they could do was wait, hoping the onslaught would not destroy the tank walls and that relief would eventually come.

One of the soldiers could not stand it, and he opened the hatch and started shooting his pistol in the enemy machine guns' direction. He dropped back into the tank dead, a massive bullet hole in his head. Bion said that was the moment he realized what it meant “to lose one's head.” The soldier, as Bion thought of it, had lost his head before opening the hatch.

So, I try not to lose my head, help to do the same for my patients, and also try not to float away from earth's storming reality.

These cytokine storms of so many COVID-19 patients and these tank-encapsulated states of mind have caused emotional storms in the psychoanalytic spaces I find myself in with my patients.

For fifty minutes, we could float in space, but every time there was distant thunder, we felt it inside too.