Life During the Coronavirus

How to find the words? How, amid the pandemic of 2020, to give meaning to the sci-fi movie we're all stuck in? One of the comforts and pleasures for me during the quarantine is reading. My selections range from crime novels by Anne Cleeves (whose grumpy, inelegant protagonist, the detective Vera Stanhope, amuses while inspiring hope) to the prose of our founder Sigmund Freud.

I like to play a game that goes like this: I can select for comfort during the weeks of isolation three brief passages by Freud. Only three. What will I choose? The three that stick in my head today capture something about loss.

First, in the essay “On Transience” (1916), Freud recounts a summer walk in the mountains with friends, one of them a poet. The poet, Freud tells us, takes no joy in the landscape, he's despondent at the fleeting nature of beauty. Freud retorts: “I did dispute the poet's pessimistic view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth. On the contrary,” he exclaims, “an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.” Scarcity—a form of finitude; when supply is limited, worth increases.

Second, in his essay “The Exceptions” (1916), Freud's example is Gloucester, in the opening soliloquy to Shakespeare's Richard III. He wonders, how does Shakespeare “compel our sympathy even with a villain like [Richard]”? Freud feels his way into the grandiosity behind human cruelty, writing in the aggrieved Gloucester's voice: “I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself since wrong has been done to me.” We could make some sense of Gloucester's perceived “right,” if only we could see deeply enough into his deprivation and suffering, and find in the villain “an enormous magnification of something we find in ourselves.” In fact, “[O]n a small scale,” writes Freud, “indeed, we are already like him … [W]e all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love.” Because the king's truths are ugly, as an exception he feels entitled to lie. Is a public figure's despicable behavior aware, or unaware? The answer, in Freud's analysis of Richard III, is both. Here Freud helps me make sense of an elected leader's delusional “right” to bully, ridicule, and destroy.

And third, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud describes an 18-month old child's “great cultural achievement.”

Freud watches his grandson, playing with a wooden spool and string: “fortda.” A “good little boy,” the toddler lets his mother go without fuss, repeatedly tossing his toy over the side of his crib, “fort” (gone), then pulling it back, “da” (there). The boy uses his imagination to make something out of his pain. In playing “gone,” he gives shape and meaning to the loss: a process of mourning by which he grows. In emphasizing the untiring repetition of disappearance punctuated by the toddler's spoken “o-o-o-o” [fort], Freud captures the centrality of language to the individual's developmental process, and in culture itself. The baby finds the words.

Three responses to the inevitability of loss. In the first, loss creates value. In the second, the narcissist, convinced that his losses uniquely set him apart, contrives to create in himself the right to exploit, humiliate, and wound. And in the third, art, or cultural making: The child uses his imagination to make something out of loss, easing his pain.

These sentences by Freud, in their humanity and grace, give me comfort in this dark time. They also refresh my love of psychoanalysis.