When Lyn Yonack decided to devote the Fall 2020 issue of The American Psychoanalyst (TAP) to Covid-19, she asked if I would commission and shepherd a special section of writings with a psychoanalytic spin on personal lives — intimate, professional or public — and the virus. I agreed. Seven authors signed on: Four of these writings, by Ellen Pinsky, Forrest Hamer, Hasani Baharanyi, and Maranda Sze, will appear in this issue. The essays by Lisa Roth, Matthew von Unwerth, and Tareq Yaqub will be published in the next TAP. Some are senior members of APsaA, others just starting; some are people of color; others are white, one, a resident of Hong Kong, is a Chinese (CAPA) candidate. They are as varied as their circumstances.

On May 25, George Floyd was murdered with a knee on his neck in Minneapolis. Some of what you will read directly or indirectly reflects that killing and responses to it. The overlap of an uprising against and reckoning with white privilege, psychological and societal, with the radical changes of uncertain kind and duration required for survival under the tutelage of the coronavirus has created powerful crosscurrents in which the personal and the public interact. Despite some of our past failures, it is a moment and task for which psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists are well suited. These vignettes rise to the challenge.