by Danni Biondini, LMFT

Well, that escalated quickly. We’re in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, as you know, as you shelter-in-place and Zoom-into-session from your household bunkers. At the time I write this, we have yet to see the impact it will have. So far, our Spring psychoanalytic events and conferences have been cancelled, and the future of our communities remain uncertain. 

With no future to foretell, I decided instead to look into the past. This I’m clear about: as we adjust to our new lives, at least we have the Internet.

This was more than Freud had, in 1920, when the Spanish flu descended on his own family, killing his 26-year old daughter, Sophie. 

He wrote in a letter to Oskar Pfister, “That afternoon we received the news that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by influenzal pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed. Although we had been worried about her for a couple of days, we had nevertheless been hopeful; it is so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance [sic]; we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended, after the first alarming news; there was no train, not even for an emergency. The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us.”