The COVID‐19 pandemic and individual and collective defences

Abstract

At the start of March, 2020, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI) volunteers organized an emergency helpline. This consisted of a limited series of consultations by telephone or online, with four free sessions which would not lead to a course of psychotherapy. All the operators carrying out this work gathered regularly in peer‐supervision groups where they compared their work and fulfilled a holding function for each other. The reasons for the requests varied from the reappearance of a previous psychiatric situation, to the sense of loneliness, anxiety, panic, feeling of persecution, somatizations, and hypochondriacal experiences, and on another level the dysregulation of the familial environment, marital difficulties, and parenting problems. Because of the intensity of the trauma, alongside the commonest defenses, other defenses have been activated, such as externalization, exporting, and shifting into the other of a psychic suffering that cannot be worked through. Emotional withdrawal, the avoidance of contact in the state of heightened alertness are other characteristics of these situations. The suffering that derives from these traumas will then be at the center of a crucible formed by the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the transpersonal. Today psychoanalysis is encountering enormous cultural and social changes, and this recent experiment of ours has shown us the importance of working to give a response in moments of crisis since needs that are not worked through today risk being transformed into serious psychopathological problems tomorrow.