Tales of COVID-19: Fear of Contagion and Need for Infection

Abstract

The pandemic has been such a dramatic experience that it has newly illuminated the factors that can transform Hegel’s necessary “infection”—a permeability to the other and the intersubjective foundation of the ego—into a contagion that alienates the subject. The dialectic between these two kinds of otherness represents what is truly at stake in any encounter—i.e., mutual recognition. Therefore, despite the terrible load of concreteness and suffering that bears directly on psychoanalysis, the theater of analysis still stands, so that the “tales of COVID-19” should also be listened to as fictional, that is, as unconscious communications in the here and now.