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The cover image of the recently published book, Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life is Edward Hopper’s painting ‘Cape Cod Morning’. A woman stands alone inside her house looking out of the bay window - waiting or watching? Outside is the wood, dark, impenetrable, and yellow autumn grass beautiful and scaring in its intensity, as on fire. The sky is blue. The atmosphere is uncanny. The painting captures what has been, and in some parts of the world still is, daily life during the pandemic period: isolation, anguish, uncertainty, paranoid watchfulness but also, wishful waiting for good news.
During this extraordinary period, which has affected all of us, psychoanalysts have continued their clinical practice, though under new and challenging frames. Discussions and reflections on experiences began almost immediately, shared in different channels - online discussions, international journals and in this new book from Phoenix publishing house. The editors, Howard B. Levine and Ana de Staal, invited well-known psychoanalysts and authors from different continents to contribute (altogether sixteen, including the editors), and the result is a book trying to
photograph at a moment ‘t’ - between August and December 2020 - the way in which each of us was trying to confront the death brought about by the pandemic by reflecting on its more immediate impact on our patients, our practice, and ourselves (Levine and de Staal, p xxi).
I wondered, how had the authors solved the challenge to be in the middle of the pandemic while writing, without what is so valuable for psychoanalysts - time to let things work in and on the mind. Would it be a kind of diary, notes from daily life that could be food for later reflections? The result is richer and more varied than I expected. It not only contains personal descriptions of how the sudden changes of the setting was handled but also discussions on political and institutional issues as well as metapsychological reflections, clinical theory, and case