But seriously, the “project” that was once psychoanalysis, or now psychotherapy or whatever, has been disrupted by Covid-19. Telemedicine, Telehealth, Telepresence, is here to stay, according to some. This is a watershed moment, a bump or a shove into the next paradigm. No going back? Well, I won’t be the only one kicking and not quite screaming, but rather only moaning and possibly sulking. I’ve lost one or two from the caseload: people who perhaps think the virus scare is not what it’s negatively cracked up to be. Or—here’s a thought—maybe they think I’m not all I am positively cracked up to be, and therefore the crisis that’s upon us is a pretext for a separation. Neurosis aside, this situation is not what I trained for. Something’s missing, and something else has been mobilized in response. Temporally appropriate feedback. That’s a term I heard yesterday, used to explain why the phone, the latest video technology, the e-mail, and even the text message might be used for a psychotherapeutic exchange and why the fax machine never was. It wasn’t quick enough, basically. That’s what temporally appropriate feedback means, by the way. Yes, I know. Talk about unnecessary verbiage, someone’s dissertation nomenclature. Anyway, whatever’s happened overnight, it seems tailor-made for opportunists, entrepreneurs; futurist thinkers with a survivalist edge and a nose for the front of a line. I’ve thought about my peers, even some of my colleagues in all of this. Some of them belong in the jungle, I think, pulling at the bamboo, or squeezed into a tight gap beneath a fallen hut or an all-terrain jeep. They have grease on their hands, an ample toilet paper stash, and numbers dancing across their mirrored pupils, for they have versatile, fix-it aptitudes, which means they navigate well all the toys that mediate contact with the material world and which are derivatives of the childhood games they played better than anyone else.
What is always there is never noticed until it is missing, said Jose Bleger. That’s another of those psychoanalytic aphorisms that are meant to stir thought if not practical solutions. What is it that was always there? I have wondered aimlessly instead of, say, moving to use Venmo, or signing up for What’s App, or whatever, as if those were the clues. I don’t skip along a trail of newfangled ideas the way that others who…don’t use words like newfangled and therefore don’t have issues with planned obsolescence, come to think of it. I thought I had an idea, dull as it may seem, of what was and is always there: the analytic frame, manifest as the office space, with a door leading to a waiting area wherein a would-be patient sits and waits for me to open my door and beckon them towards me. It sounds more authoritarian than it is. And it seemed like it still had a few years left in it, too, as paradigmatic frameworks go. Now it isn’t there. Or, it is there but it seems like an abandoned warehouse with a faintly stale air about it. Recently, I’ve not been getting my money’s worth out of my office. It collects mail, a bit more dust than usual. I can go there once a week and make a phone call from it if I like, but it’s not the same. The nice view from the window’s not the same. There’s no collegial hum across the walls that connect to other suites. There’s nothing charming anymore about the rickety elevator that takes me to my floor, or pleasing about the sudden abundance of parking spaces in the adjoining lot. And after the first week of lockdown—not even the consolation of a few toilet rolls to steal from the bathrooms. What was always there? I haven’t figured that out yet, but like a good would-be analyst, I am thinking, still wondering.
Meanwhile, I am thinking of bigger things, philosophical, mindful ideas. Phenomenology, I think. I’m reminiscing, at least, if not deepening. Back in 2001, I thought 9-11 was a fine how-do-you-do to the 21st century. Now I think that episode less an introduction to doomsday than the residue of the last century, with all of its terrorizing, authoritarian ghosts. Not that we don’t have plenty of nutjobs these days, but you don’t beat the 20th century for tyrants and martial horror: two world wars, a couple of nuclear explosions (not counting the tests in the Pacific and the deserts of the American Southwest); Hitler, Stalin, a few other genocides, assassinations all over the place, at least one war that America lost. Seriously, a total s—tshow. But 9-ll, which made household names of Al Queda and a guy named Bin Laden, seems today like a distant memory of airport inconvenience and yesteryear jingoism: a tough deal for anyone sniffing at a military life, but for the rest of us, not the economic and civil collapse that stares at us now. Images of twin towers burning didn’t make the cut of my recent Dr. Strangelove video, with its “We’ll Meet Again” montage of zeitgeist existential threats, 2020-style. Not topical. Scenes of floods, wildfires, stranded polar bears and penguins on thinning ice were the visual accompaniment, not the cold war terror of mushroom clouds or the once Arab stereotype of airplane hijackings. Covid-19 snuck into the slide show with the odd picture of a solitary figure wearing a hospital mask amid empty landscapes, signifying for me, anyway, the ubiquity of the virus’ impact: the live presentation I was meant to give on Strangelove was canceled, after all.
The ‘live’ has always been there. Nature has always been there, and the notion that it won’t be has long felt like an abstraction, despite the slide show of evidence to the contrary. It’s trite to point out that nature is unforgiving, getting its revenge upon us now or else teaching us a lesson, perhaps in the nick of time, depending on what climate change scientists actually think and wonder. It’s further trite to distill the Bleger reverie and consider that what is always there is a warning to not ignore the signs of danger; to notice the impact of phenomena upon others, environments, even things. Indeed, it stirs shame to consider that Covid-19 has aroused more fear, more loss, or more determination than any other modern calamity simply because, unlike any other world event one might remember, this has truly impacted everyone to one degree or another. I conjure the grim-faced, somewhat unsympathetic gaze of those who have known and felt war, environmental catastrophe, unspeakable man-made atrocities or the constant slaps of racism and other oppressions. They may be quietly saying, Oh, so we’re all in this together now, are we? Maybe some of them got a head start. They’re like California, or North Korea or Singapore, or whomever else might have done this thing right. They were and are good with the things, and technology, that which mediates and distances us from nature, enables, intrudes, obstructs, complicates, and yet may save us. It helps…sort of.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 