Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life: Common Distress, Individual Experience.

Abstract

Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life conveys the editors’ commitment to cover the complexities of the pandemic that has impacted and continues to impact our discipline in unforeseen ways. The title of the book is a prelude to multifaceted elaborations on significant changes in psychoanalytic work. Almost overnight, psychoanalysis began to display its resilience, adapting itself to operate under a state of siege imposed by an invisible yet deathly virus. As the title declares, these changes generated a new way of life for psychoanalysis, which continued to go on living in covidian life. Organized in six distinctive parts, Psychoanalysis and the Covidian Life at times appears to be a guide for mental health practitioners working under unusual conditions. It manages to expand the theoretical and technical repertoire needed for processing a traumatizing biological event that affected communities across the globe. The contributors offer a much-needed attempt to conceptualize collective and individual distress, including the social/political context in which the pandemic emerged, its effect on the therapeutic setting and the frame, and the immediacy of the clinical realm. The different chapters of this seminal book weave a rich tapestry of this covidian life. Sixteen psychoanalysts from across the world reflect on a biological event and its aftermath as it impacted theoretical and clinical domains. International perspectives complement each other, resulting in a comprehensive record of practicing psychoanalysis during the last two years. Reading this book, one is bound to realize that COVID-19 has