Psychoanalysis and Covidian Life

Howard B. Levine is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society, on the faculty of the NYU Post-Doc Contemporary Freudian track, on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series, and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has authored many articles, book chapters, and reviews on psychoanalytic process and technique and the treatment of primitive personality disorders. His co-edited books include Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac, 2013); On Freud’s Screen Memories (Karnac, 2014); The Wilfred Bion Tradition (Karnac 2016); Bion in Brazil (Karnac, 2017), and Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative (Karnac, 2018). He is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque, 2019) and the forthcoming Between the Silence and the Cry (Routledge). Ana de Staal is a psychoanalyst, member of the Freudian Psychoanalysis Society (SPF), and psychosomatist. Former editor-in-chief at the review Chimères, founded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, she now runs Éditions d’Ithaque in France. She has translated and published the French editions of most of W. R. Bion’s seminars, as well as the works of important authors of contemporary psychoanalysis, such as Thomas Ogden, Antonino Ferro, Christopher Bollas, Martin Bergmann, and André Green. She works in privative practice in Paris.

Acknowledgements










About the editors and contributors

Editors’ note



Part I

The background scene/the context



1. Civilization and the discontented



2. The coronavirus pandemic and its meanings



Part II

Living and thinking in pandemic times



3. The shattering of a denial as food for thought



4. Landscapes of mental life under Covid-19



5. Catastrophe and its vicissitudes: denial and the vitalising effect of “good air”



Part III

The setting under pressure



6. Being online: what does it mean for psychoanalysis?



7. The burnt compartment. Or: Psychoanalysis without a couch



8. Individual distress, institutional distress



Part IV

Reconfigurations and changes in practice 



9. Body and soul in remote analysis: anguished countertransference, pandemic panic, and space–time limits



10. A short circuit in the analytical process



11. Beyond the all-traumatic: narrative imagination and new temporalities in the analytic session



Part V

Clinical journals



12. Katabasis, anabasis: working in a post-ICU Covid-19 unit in a public hospital



13. Where does the psychoanalyst live? The online setting in the psychoanalysis of a three-year-old girl on the autistic spectrum



14. Where does the Covid live? Osmotic/diffuse anxieties, isolation, and containment in times of the plague



Part VI

Conclusion



15. Covidian life



Index