On April 10, The Guardian published an article titled “A Tale of Two New Yorks: Pandemic Lays Bare a City's Shocking Inequalities,” exploring how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the gap between the city's two societies. The article quotes Jumaane Williams, the public advocate: “One society was able to run away to the Hamptons and work from home and have food delivered to their door; the other society was deemed ‘essential workers’ and made to go out to work without protection.” This tale of two societies is the tale of many cities, and of the country as a whole. First the pandemic, and then the brutal killings of Black people by police officers, exposed, yet again, the clear inequalities and disparities that have been endemic to our way of life.
While before, we could erect the defense mechanisms of denial and splitting, resisting knowledge and avoiding reality in the social sphere, the Covid-19 pandemic has stripped us, for better and for worse, of our blindness, at least for now. We are confronted, yet again, with the realization that we live in a society Hanna Segal described (in the audiovisual project of the Anna Freud Center), as an “anti-mind” culture, a society where one is confused about what matters, what is essential in the external and internal reality, about the importance of depth, what depth means, and what truth is.
Melanie Klein writes, “Security was first of all afforded us by our mother, who not only stilled the pangs of hunger, but also satisfied our emotional need and relieved our anxiety. Security attained by satisfaction of our essential requirements is therefore linked up with emotional security.” (Love, Guilt and Reparation). While we all feel bereft of “mother” and basic security by the pandemic, with fear of death and real loss at our doorsteps and inside some of our homes, a large section of our society has lived with this fundamental sense of not having society's love and security for a long time, and increasingly so. Besieged by stay home orders, and by helicopters, police cars, and sirens in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, we feel our wings have been clipped, especially at the frightening moment of the curfew. Yet many, especially people of color, especially the poor and underserved have lived with clipped wings, in sociopsychological curfew and the hovering police presence for as long as they can collectively remember.
This has brought me to question, not for the first time, my own human and civil responsibilities, as a member of our society and as a psychoanalyst. Such questioning has long been part of psychoanalytic tradition. In his paper of 1919, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy,” Freud stated clearly and poetically his vision for the future of psychoanalysis: In order for psychoanalysis to be far-reaching and impact the misery of those who suffer most, those deprived and poor, it needs to add more clinicians to its ranks and create free clinics through which to affect a change in “the conscience of society.” This propelled the creation of free clinics in several European cities between the wars, along with the Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham wartime nurseries in London (Elizabeth A. Danto, Freud's Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice).
Engaging as a psychoanalyst with the work of affecting “the conscience of society” is ongoing, but increasingly urgent with this current crisis. Allowing ourselves to experience our collective pain and guilt, not cutting ourselves off from or denying the raging pandemic or the racial brutality and social injustices may bring us to the depths of the depressive position, where we must fight falling back into our defenses of splitting and denial (Hanna Segal, “Silence is the Real Crime”). From this position comes hope for reparation and change. As Melanie Klein and others have taught us, the desire to see reality is deeply connected with the love of truth, and is at the heart of the internal process that brings about change (Rachel Blass, personal communications).
Beside my private practice with children and adults, for a long while I have worked with families and young children at an East Harlem community center, as part of being co-director of the Parent-Infant Psychotherapy training at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. There, I supervise students and see parents, mainly mothers, with babies and young children. When the pandemic broke, I continued to speak with families over the phone. In my private practice, I continue
Talia Hatzor, Ph.D, is a psychoanalyst working with babies, children, and adults, and a training analyst at the CFS. She is faculty at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, where she co-directs the Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Training Program.
seeing my patients, children, their parents, and adults, in this bewildering new reality. In my tale of two cities, I grapple with many questions and experiences, realizing how we are all mourning and afraid; how we have lost our sense of security, patients and clinicians alike; how we struggle to stay connected; how our patients struggle to continue doing what they signed up for, understanding themselves deeper in ways that help them change. I have also faced again the stark awareness that pain, loss, and suffering are not the same on both sides.
I face helplessness and despair, question my role as clinician, wonder what am I doing, whether I am mainly assuaging my guilt. Am I fooling myself that my attempt to stay connected during lockdown with parents, who struggle to provide their families with basic necessities, food and diapers, really matters? Although these questions gnaw on my mind, my experience with two mothers with similar experiences, in the two different tales of the city, shows me a glimpse of hope, and a certain clarity regarding what is important.
One mother has been with her young child at home, along with the father, who has been working. This mother has found, in the lockdown, an opportunity to be with her young toddler at home, and to get to know him and herself as a mother in ways she couldn't imagine when he was in daycare. Before the lockdown, this mother was suffering from chronic guilt, projecting into her son her own damaged objects, and this son was in a permanent state of troubling separation anxiety and dysregulation. Once forced together, and with the softening of her guilt, a much deeper task became available to her: She was able to work on her inner world, which was distorting her perception of her son and causing havoc in their relationship. The lockdown offered her a chance to face her conflicted maternal identity, and it offered them a possibility to work through their relationship, to repair and rebuild it.
I see that the work with the internal world, our psychoanalytic contribution to our patients… is probably most aligned with democratic humanistic values of social justice.
The other mother is an essential worker with a part-time job, who, as the sole provider for her family, had no choice but to work. In one of our conversations, she shared that several of her co-workers have died of Covid-19; she spoke of her fear of her own dying and leaving her children orphaned, of hiding money around the house in case she is hospitalized and they need to buy food. This mother has also found herself with her younger child, also a toddler, with special needs, discovering things about him and herself that were not available to her when we met in person and he was in a daycare. Again, the issue of guilt was critical here: her sense that she has somehow damaged him and is responsible for his disability was the source of much pain and self-reproach. As her sense of herself as a mother changed, allowing her to see with greater clarity how her own internal story cast a shadow that distorted him, she could see him in new ways. He began to talk, they played and laughed, their relationship becoming livelier.
As I reflect on these two mothers and my remote work with them, it crosses my mind that, first, I have been suffering from a certain bias that those in harsher circumstances, those who are suffering more acutely from societal trauma and deprivation, the ones on the other side of my city and its privileges, need more concrete services, more practical solutions, more support, and benefit less from the deeper work we can provide. My “colonized mind,” it seems, has carried a sense of superiority into my work with families who live in the other New York. My doubts about providing “good psychic food” to those in need of concrete food have created in me a sense of despair that, as a psychoanalyst, I do not have as much to offer them. Yet, I see that the work with the internal world, our psychoanalytic contribution to our patients is not only possible and available to everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, but it is probably most aligned with democratic humanistic values of social justice.
As Freud said in 1918, “the poor man should have just as much right to assistance with his mind as he now has to the life-saving help of surgery.”