First, we would like to welcome the new candidates, the new community members and friends to the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. To all the contributors who were able to express their intimate feelings in this particular moment of our lives we are grateful beyond words. Crtica, would also like to thank the PINC Board and community for their support. A special congratulation to the many members who presented at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Vancouver. In this issue we have published some of the summaries of their panel contributions and papers presented. Are we “Post Pandemic” or not? Unfortunately the crisis continues, fuelled by political and economic interests. Historians, political scholars and economists are largely in agreement on this. The pandemic is still in our minds in both conscious and unconscious ways. The fear of death or getting sick is still present in our daily work. Most of us are still working remotely via Zoom and phone and there is a shifting state of uncertainty about our future. These issues have been taken up in the current psychoanalytic literature. When the pandemic started Margulies (2021 ) in a review of Warren Poland’s work lucidly captured our experiences: “But then pandemic hit … Everything slowed down, time seemed distorted and life became fragile in new and strange ways. There was no living precedent for plague – the last worldwide pandemic of such scale was a century ago. World history suddenly seemed clearer to me, as if I had missed something essential in my own limitations of empathy to those in the past. And new reviewer questions came forward to meet me: What are the necessary underpinnings for creating a psychoanalytic space in a world that is changing the very essence of how we encounter one another? What now is the place for witnessing?……… but one sharply interrupted by the enveloping uncanniness of a world overrun by unchecked plague, social outrage over racist violence, and existential threats to democracy. A mirror to life during turmoil, the stakes heighten in a search for what is enduring and valuable about the psychoanalytic process itself” (p.619). The pandemic has stimulated a vast literature in psychoanalysis and the social sciences, as well as in medical fields. The focus is mostly on clinical issues and interventions. The reader is referred to the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. Almost two years have elapsed and we are still in a pandemic state. On October 11 th I watched the Blue Angels flying over the City. The show was beautiful and the acrobatic pilots made us forget another reality. The roofs of the buildings on Washington Street were crowded with people without masks drinking and eating. The weather was like a summer day. It was a day to remember. Everything resembled our past. Yet, when I returned home and read the NY Times magazine of that day I saw that the cover story was on attacks on the Asian population and the change of identity taking place in Asian communities across America. The next article was about a young woman, aged 13, who had to leave her home in order to survive. The news was not reassuring. The pandemic is still rampant in many states, where hospitals are unable to contain it. Nurses and doctors suffer from ‘residual work’, meaning that the stress at work continues when they go home: a form of depression. Many colleagues are discussing new forms of depression such as frozen depression, disassociated states of depression, a dead zone, feeling like zombies. Some speak of the force of Thanatos. For me, both patients and analysts are experiencing the same depressions. (depression)The intersubjective field, in the broad frame introduced by the Barangers, has collapsed. The pandemic has entered into our offices and we must work with both what is communal and what is internal.
Fragmented music and hope.
On Friday night October 12th, I was in my garage, a museum with vintage electronics and a large collection of music. I was able to find a CD that I think conveyed musically our feelings during this pandemic. The music, by the Kronos Quartet and Astor Piazzolla, was entitled “Five Tango Sensations”. The tangos are Asleep, Loving, Anxiety, Despair and Fear. Piazzolla plays the bandoneon, a small accordion that produces a dynamic, nostalgic sound. The music (available on Youtube) is complex, dark, romantic, and intense. Listening to Piazzolla’s music brought to mind Maureen Franey’s paper and Rosalinda Taymor’s painting from this issue. Both inspire hope in the world. Maureen suggests that we must work in a way that we are connected with each other. We are not islands unto ourselves. I agree that psychoanalytic ideas cannot be transformative if we are an island. We must work in a collective manner to change this fragmented and difficult world. Rosalinda’s painting – “Hope” – is of a young psychiatrist, expecting a child: our future, perhaps a better future.
Margulies, A. (2021). Alongside: Regarding the Otherness of Warren
Poland. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Vol.102, No. 3, pp. 618-
629.
The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. Special
issue: Psychoanalytic Contributions to Understanding the Covid 19
Pandemic, June 2021.
