Sofia

Sofia is a young woman aged 28 who lives, since 5 years, with her mate in Iceland. She is an “Italian-expat”, meaning that she had to leave the country in the hope of finding a proper job, which she actually did so that she now works in the food service industry. She comes from Sardinia, where she returns every year in order to visit her old and lonely mother.

Sofia’s mother has gone through several hospitalizations due to her bipolar disorder, of which she has suffered since her daughter was a little girl. Sofia’s father died about ten years ago.

During therapy Sofia gets in contact with her strong rage towards the mother, her fragility, her dependence on others. Such a rage intensifies when Sofia begins to entertain the idea of becoming a mother herself: “How will I be able to take care of a baby? I don’t want to end up like my mother: her life was ruined by my birth”.

Sofia’s guilt for the mere fact of existing (as a separate entity from her mother) is appeased when she returns to Sardinia. At that point, however, something within her rebels, as for a sense of betrayal towards herself and her life-project with her boyfriend.

This oscillating movement between Iceland and Sardinia characterizes the first year of treatment, until when, in February 2020, the Covid-19 emergency suddenly entered into Sofia’s associations with a cursory hint at the fact that her temperature was taken at the airport.

Sofia starts to get informed, more and more anxiously, about the situation. But the more she reads, the more her uncertainty about what is happening grows. The crucial date is March the 9th, when Italy enters a total-lockdown. Sofia is staying in Sardinia, yet she would still have the possibility to go back to Iceland. However, she decides not to do anything, rationally motivating her decision by the risk of being quarantined or, even worse, bringing the virus with her on the other island.

Nevertheless, on an emotional level, Sofia gives herself up, and surrenders to reclusion with the mother. Thus we enter in an indefinitely suspended time and in a space of co-existence with an imperceptible, still virtually lethal, pathogenic agent. I can witness my mind anxiously searching for a meaning about what is happening. I think of an automatic reflex, as a way to cope with the impingement. A reflex in the direction of melting with “the warm body of the mother”.

Although I think that, in the case of Sofia’s choice, the guilt for abandoning the mother-in-need would have been too much to bear and work-through. Possibly, this is partly due to what needed to be contained (the intensity of guilt), partly due to the quality of the container (my analytical presence in an online-setting).

I then consider the unconscious dynamic of a general movement of “surrender of individual surregnity”, a kind of compliance towards a “hive-mind functioning” (do societies more act to collective co-ordination react more efficiently to a pandemic?), triggered not so much by a desire to conform and obey to a higher-order proclaimed by a Government which does not govern (Sofia’s rationalization), but by a sudden (traumatic) perception of mutual dependency between human beings.

Altea

Altea, 40 years old, interrupted her one-year-long relationship because she felt her boyfriend as too demanding, which interfered with her career. In fact, she works as a biomedical researcher in Spain and she describes herself as a “drained brain” and a “workaholic” who invested all her existence in work. But after the umpteenth relational failure she decides to take a sabbatical during which she plans to undergo a psychoanalysis. We have a regular analysis for a year. However, at the end of the sabbatical, we face the dilemma whether to interrupt a fair-enough (not-impinging) analysis or to keep on going. Be it as it may, she is unable to free herself from the obligation to return to her work in Barcelona.

Altea expresses her need to continue her analysis with me by internet. Even if it was not what she initially planned, she confesse with some prude, she feels to be still too much in difficulty as regards to the affective dimension of relationships and, moreover, she would like to carry on a relationship, the one with her analyst, which she experiences as safe and intense.

The Covid-19 alert enters Altea’s life as “an annoying distraction from work... a typically Italian hysteria”. Nevertheless, right because she just returned from one of her frequent visits to Italy (during which we have regular sessions) she is compelled to wear a face-mask when at work. She starts to perceive a sense of extraneity in walking in the streets of the city that had made her feel welcome so many years before.

She wonders where home is. And lives it as an abusive intrusion, an obstacle to her research activity, when her father (a physician) insists that she comes back to Italy, because, in his view, Spain will undergo a tsunami of contagion similar to the one that invested Italy and his daughter will be isolated in a small apartment in the center of Barcelona. According to Altea, he is exaggerating: he is an Italian father who would like to have his daughter at home, all for himself, just like when she was a child.

I underline the desire to close up in a narcissistic monad, impenetrable to any external advice, in order not to return to an infantile way of relating to father. After a moment, she confesses that what father suggests is alluring: it would immunize her from any need to worry and thinking (“I would spend the quarantine snoozing while I have sun-baths in our farmstead in Monferrato”), but obstacles her search for her man, because it zeros within her any emotive intensity (Green, 1966-1967).

Altea decides to come back to Italy, yet she astonishingly discovers that this is no easy challenge: this time it is not as immediate as it had always been. Her usual high-speed trains are cancelled, airplanes impossible to book, and low-cost busses are complete. Looks like the border is impassable.

Except that, a few days later, Altea surprises me inasmuch as she can create, with patience, a new route for returning home. Therefore she returns, and describes the travel with an unknown personal participation and emotive intensity: not just her usual, lonesome, routinary transfer; but she involves me in the travel as a surprising “two-way affair” (Nissim Momigliano, 1984, p. 347ff.).

A technological prosthesis

Online settings increase the danger of drifting from stretching out towards the patient to becoming a prosthesis for the patient: “An only partially animate object, ... which is not entirely inactive, and which can be the source of some kind of vitality” (Micati, 1993, p. 207ff.).

Speziale-Bagliacca (2010) reminds us that even theories can be technological prosthesis for us, with the function of “regulating emotions when we need to face a complex and difficult task”: “When ... curiosity towards other solutions is inhibited, or a new experience avoided, those prostheses end up being fossilized and they are lived as the result of experience” (p. 214).

On the same track, Contardi and Gaburri (1994) note: “When working-through and innovative-making are blocked, turning to ‘the norm’ has the aim of containing a possible ‘over-flow’ and ‘violations’ both on a theoretical and a deontological level. It is evident that our thoughts, in this regard, go both to the present political situation and to what happened … to our society-structure. Clearly, with our discourse, we do not intend to devalue making any recourse to ‘ethical codes' for controlling groupal phenomena which have gone out of control (psychotic aspects which have taken on the leadership of groups), but we want to suggest that ‘the norm’ by itself is not able to produce any transformation, unless it is come along a careful reflection about the ‘discontents’ that run across the collective dimensions. Bion suggests that servitude and complaisance are the product of our own ‘hallucinations’ and fears, rather than the result of super-egoic oppression. This explains why our main ethical direction is to be antithetical to the ‘repetition compulsion’, that is: it cannot be a mere attitude of ‘fighting the evil’; rather, it is a tension towards the continuous search for brand new hypotheses which can promote authentical transformative movements, not just those ‘prostheses’ Freud spoke about. Among those ‘prostheses’, Bion pointed at any increase in knowledge (K) that does not correspond to a parallel consciousness about its limits and enthusiasm towards the unknown” (p. 640).

The two authors refer to Civilization and Its Discontent, where Freud describes how lost omniscience and omnipotence are recovered with the help of “science and technology”: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent”; yet he “does not feel happy in his Godlike character” (Freud, 1929, pp. 91-2).

With the present writing I bear witness of how also “nomadic patients”, who are used to moving in between places, have been subjected to the impact of Covid-19 emergency.

However, this writing also deals, implicitly, with the possibilities of tele-analysis. It is my opinion that the analyst cannot but “continuously destroy” (Winnicott, 1969) the technological tools on which any possibility of a tele-analysis relies inasmuch as they are highly non-ideal for analysis. Only after she has destroyed them, after she has highlighted every defect and shortcoming, can she learn to use them.

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Contardi R. & Gaburri E. (1994). Etica, civiltà e psicoanalisi [Ethics, Civilization, and Psychoanalysis]. Rivista di Psicoanalisi, 40, 4, pp. 623-643.

Freud S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, 57-146.

Green A. (1966-1967). Primary narcissism: structure or state? In Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism. London: Free Association Books, 2001.

Micati L. (1993). How Much Reality Can We Bear?. Rivista Psicoanal., 39: 205-215.

Nissim Momigliano L. (1984). Two people talking in a room. An investigation into the analytic dialogue. In Shared Experience. London: Routledge 1999; also in Borgogno F., Marino Coe L. & Luchetti A. (2016), Reading Italian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Speziale-Bagliacca R. (2010). Come vi stavo dicendo. Nuove tecniche in psicoanalisi [As I was saying. New Techniques in Psychoanalysis]. Roma: Astrolabio.

Winnicott, D.W. (1969). The Use of an Object. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 50: 711-716.