As a Hongkonger, I have traveled daily across the border to Shenzhen, a city in mainland China; there, I see private patients in analysis and psychotherapy. Shenzhen and Hong Kong form the Greater Bay Area, an integrated regional economic zone under what has been two quite different political and legal systems. Since late January, following the outbreak of Covid-19, separate quarantine policies in the two cities have kept me from seeing my patients in my office. Since I had moved back to Hong Kong from another city some years ago, I was already seeing some patients online. With them, continuity across borders was easy. A majority of my in-person patients from the Mainland also made the move to online sessions. I am afraid, however, that during the interruption those who did not may be feeling abandoned.
My distance analytic training across the ocean with the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute was not threatened by our quarantine as I already participated online. And, when Covid-19 arrived in the United States, the Institute quickly moved all their students to online learning. We and our patients had to adjust in this unsettled time.
For children, though, who had been seen only in person, online work seemed to inspire creativity. Technology becomes a toy and games and animation are shared on screen! When they stop to share their treasures at home, something
Maranda Yee Tak Sze, PhD, a psychoanalytic candidate with the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, has a private practice in Shenzhen, China.
new is generated for understanding and reflection. For psychoanalytic infant observation seminar leaders, it became an opportunity to creatively rethink the setting, which had been damaged by Covid-19. We had to find new ways that observers, infants, caretakers and seminar group members could keep each other in mind when they could not get together in person. Our supervisor, Nydia Lisman-Pieczanski, said, significantly, “Innovation is required to rescue the observational studies”; and, I will add, it is required to rescue clinical practice and education.
One-to-one clinical practice sometimes is not enough. Hongkongers in 2003 during the outbreak of SARS learned from experience and the free flow of information to manage fear and a health emergency. This year, having information closer to the truth than that had by those in other places, we were better positioned to quickly mobilize resources to protect ourselves and those in need. Sitting inside my Hong Kong fortress, I knew millions of people in China were suffering from fear, and felt guilty.
So when Elise Snyder contacted Gilbert Kliman in February to adapt his 2008 mental health workbook for children, “My Sichuan Earthquake Story,” to the Covid-19 epidemic in China, I volunteered. I rallied a small team of colleagues from the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance to speedily write new content and revise old parts for the new context. We wrote in Chinese and translated to English. “My Epidemic Story” is now available online free in both languages for use by parents and their children. When Covid-19 spread to other places of the world the workbook became “My Pandemic Story.” I also wrote two small articles for pregnant women and parents that they might help themselves and their children through the pandemic. When Covid-19 became a shared experience around the world, we in the East became the ones to help, sharing, for example, what we had learned about the importance of face masks.
Though Shenzhen had ended its lockdown by April, in July I still could not go back to my office. The quarantine policies of the two cities prevented it. My colleagues in China had began to talk about how to resume in-person work, and my in-person patients had started to ask when I would be back in the office. But I was restricted to the place I call home – Hong Kong.
Separated from my patients and Chinese colleagues, I began to feel alone and alienated, for a powerful political virus joined by Covid-19 is prevailing to further erode Hong Kong's autonomy. Out of the need to manically defend against uncertainties and helplessness, and with the benefit of seclusion, I engineer enough new projects to fully occupy my time and mind for a whole year. Yet something else preoccupies my heart: the fear of losing freedom – freedom to access information, freedom to tell the truth and freedom from fear – freedoms we all value highly and strive to protect. For this I believe I am not alone.