The pandemic as portal: Terror, transition and transformation

This paper was written as the keynote address for the Annual Study Day of the Irish Group Analytic Society in November 2021. Writing it gave me an opportunity to gather my thoughts about not only the deep fear and constraint I had lived with personally over the previous 18 months, but also challenged me to rethink the social consequences of the inequalities that are built into our world. I start from a position that assumes that the political and economic context in which we live influences not only our thinking and emotional life, but also our practice. As Foulkes explained many times, and he had life experiences to confirm this theory, ‘the individual is social to the core’ (1948). This means that I see a dialectical association between the external world in which I live and my internal sense-making psychic world. I notice that this link often gets missed. I suggest that what we might be taking through the portal of the pandemic will depend on our economic system, its connection to political structures, and how these contextual often ‘out-of-sight’ forces impact our lives concretely and psychically while framing our capacity to think about the situation we find ourselves in. Even though it is difficult to know what the long-term effects might be, I have found exploring these dilemmas in the social context of an on-going Larger Group gives me a form of comfort that enables me to expand my thinking and remain conscious in the face of unrelenting and frightening socio-political change. I understand the Larger Group as a place where it is possible to witness these social and political forces as they manifest themselves in the group and to explore how they connect to those that arise from my family recognizing that it is not a large Small Group but, from de Maré’s perspective, operates as an as-if society that generates different meanings. As de Maré often said,‘It is important to talk’. I have learned that talking with others in these settings, helps me to break through into new language to escribe my experience.