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.” 

If there’s one thing Freud was right about, it’s the undisguised brutality: of his time, of our time, of what’s to come next. 

Some say that the Coronavirus, and our anxiety about it, is perhaps a foreshadowing of the climate crisis ahead. What we’re experiencing now, as an adjustment to our usual ways of life, is grief. And likely there is more grief to come.

And yet Freud made it clear: the world would continue on. He adjusted his theories to account for the brutality; hopefully, we can adjust our actions. 

Perhaps knowing that the direness of these times requires collective action, solidarity, and (excuse me, psychoanalysts) behavior change. This crisis is giving us an opportunity to practice a new way of being part of a collectivity: one in which our well-being depends on the well-being of the Other. 

This may be an opportunity for us to see the impact we can make with collective action. But in the meantime, I guess, we can stay inside and learn to live with ourselves without our usual defenses. We can make memes, watch the new Freud show on Netflix, and practice accepting the things we cannot change. 

As Freud wrote his own mom the day after learning of Sophie’s death, “I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted.”