A Report from the Field: Providing Psychoanalytic Care during the Pandemic
Todd Essig, Gillian Isaacs Russell
Abstract
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.