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The COVID-pandemic has meant that we, as therapists, go through the same experiences as our patients. Bass's paper enables us to digest these last months' experience, not only from a professional perspective, but from both emotional and practical perspectives as well. In this paper, we zoom into the new opportunities frame alterations have brought, such as more intimacy and openness, both for patients and therapists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These brief remarks will serve as an introduction to papers and commentaries culled from the first International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) online Symposium, "Working in the Midst of the Covid-19 Crisis: What Can Relational Psychoanalysis Offer?" held via Zoom on January 9th and 10th, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working during Covid has created numerous challenges and taken a psychological toll on psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as patients. Psychoanalytic dialogue around and syntheses of new theory and clinical work can help us to keep ourselves both grounded and enlivened during a difficult time. Here, we introduce an issue featuring a Special Section on child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, a new, recurring Emerging Voices section, and papers presenting personal reflections on death and mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shlomit's Yadlin-Gadot's paper, "The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body," carries us into a bit of a wild, carnival-like experience: a dazzling array of images, disguises, and visual metaphors delivered with a powerful immediacy. I will stay as close as I can to what Yadlin-Gadot has presented, while at the same time trying to translate her brilliant conceptual array of terms about Covid-19, carnival and trans-subjectivity in a way that may help us define them while touching on the big questions she poses in her dual ending: What can relational thought offer in times of Covid-19, and what can Covid-19 offer relational thought in terms of a challenge? Or, where does the carnivalesque take us in terms of theory, and where does theory take us in terms of the carnivalesque? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 has affected our lives in innumerable and formerly unimaginable ways. Among its effects is the threat to our identity in terms of broken bodily boundaries, severed social contacts, and a blurring of our group belongings. A response to this mingled physio-social threat has been an unprecedented surge of trans-subjectivity, as a form of intersubjectivity that is both elevated and reduced. In this paper, this phenomenon is explored in its carnivalesque manifestation, expressing itself as both a revolt against state control and an effort to re-appropriate a sense of bodily self and other. I illustrate these ideas with theoretical, visual and clinical materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the paradoxes, challenges and opportunities we face in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. I consider the ways in which masks serve necessary protective functions, while at the same time serving defensive roles in a different register. The ways in which "remote" work can function as an obstacle to therapeutic intimacy at the same time that it can deepen it, are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a time as stressful and uncertain as a pandemic, individuals struggle to weigh the risk vs. benefit ratio as they attempt to pursue at least some of their customary life satisfactions while keeping themselves and others safe. What modifications in our usual psychoanalytic approach–if any–are called for in working with patients grappling with those decisions? What kind of influence are we exerting, consciously or unconsciously, over their views and actions during these times? How do psychoanalysts' own unrecognized needs, wishes, and anxieties affect their responsivity to their patients? This paper takes up these questions and others as part of an exploration of the ethical dimension of psychoanalytic care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic forced therapists and patients to physically separate and conduct sessions from afar. This created particular challenges for child and adolescent work, which tends to center around movement and embodiment. As therapists navigated the constraints of their new reality, early skepticism quickly gave way to creative, on-the-spot solutions. Born out of necessity, therapist's flexibility and accommodations brought about changes to the analytic frame that were unprecedented in scope. Common themes include the therapist's loss of control over the structure of psychotherapy, a renegotiation of therapist and patient roles, placing the parent at the center of treatment, findings new ways to play, and virtual treatment as a new mechanism for modulating closeness and intimacy in the therapeutic dyad. Rooted in clinical vignettes of clinicians from the early weeks of the pandemic, this paper will illustrate these themes and consider their implications for the future of psychotherapy with children and adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of narrating the memory of a traumatic and transformative event becomes a meditation on how one person is launched into psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic training, and the psychoanalytic profession. Listening to imagery, paying attention to serendipity, honoring memory in its creative, emergent form, and retaining the ideology from a first career as an advocate for criminal justice are the themes that come to define the writer's analytic voice. Approaching the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11, she looks back at her last two decades of unfolding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of 9/11 have been vanishing from memories. Yet it was a pivotal event in world history and in many families' individual life cycles. Enduring losses and ruptures have rippled into both intensely personal moments and our sociopolitical processes. We vowed initially never to forget. But the problem we faced in the aftermath of the terrifying attacks became how best to remember. Twenty years later the author reflects on those historical events from her perspective as the Consulting Psychologist to Thinc Design, the exhibition design team for the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Using now her senses attuned to the 9/11 trauma narrative and its effects on group processes, as well as her habit of thinking about memory as multi-directional dialogue among disparate-in-time meanings, she attempts to locate 9/11 in a historical constellation with Hiroshima, the War on Terror, Latin American 9/11, COVID, Black Lives Matter, dissociated grief and grievance, and the 1/6 US Capital Insurrection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cries have been loud and silent. Destruction and Stillness. Most of us have not seen our patients in person for close to a year. The tables have seemingly turned. The ways of being connected to our patients and ourselves have shifted. Who do we "see" in our electronic devices? What do our patients "see" when they encounter us in sessions? What could we not "see" in each other when we sat in the same room? What is the role of Relational Psychoanalysis in helping us "see" a way forward? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly forced nearly the entire psychoanalytic community to move treatment, supervision, and classes online, leaving many feeling uncentered, unprepared, and vulnerable. The authors, members of the APsaA COVID-19 Advisory Team and longtime researchers in screen relations-based psychoanalytic care, recount lessons learned from their pandemic experience. As both disaster victim and mental health responder, they start with the cultural context for pandemic-specific mental health practice. Going deeper into the technological context for psychoanalytic care, they describe clinically-relevant differences between screen relations and physical co-presence, highlighting risk and trust, richness, and relational embodiment as key influences on clinical process and outcome. Common adaptions and responses that helped make pandemic-specific screen relations-based treatment work emerged from their own work and discussions and consultations with numerous colleagues. Curiosity, humility, clinical creativity, and self-care are highlighted. They close with hopes for a post-pandemic world in which we can mourn loss, reestablish trust, and renew and deepen our appreciation for relationships and intimacies only possible when we are bodies together in the same place at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As of this writing, most therapists in the United States and in many places throughout the world are working exclusively via telehealth as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been excruciatingly painful for a number of patients, in some cases triggering severe separation anxiety responses and attachment-related trauma as weeks of physical separation turn into months which threaten to become a year or more—the story is still being written. One patient in particular feels that she has lost me, and in the countertransference, it feels like I've abandoned her. What follows is an exploration of this treatment as it illustrates clinician-patient collective trauma, especially in light of an enactment that forced me to confront our overlapping histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]