Space, time and relationships in the pandemic: elaborations

Abstract

The pandemic crisis and the subsequent experiences of confinement many have gone through are examined by three psychoanalysts from the perspective of the effects, both manifest and latent, that were felt in their private practices. The dimensions of space, time, and interpersonal relationships, seen as constituting the basic bonds that sustain the feeling of identity, were chosen as guidelines to organize the material presented. The dimension of space is approached through the different representations of home that emerged in the associative work under analysis. The home in its dimensions of concentration, verticality, and horizontality. The welcoming, safe, invaded, imprisoning, ruined, repaired, renovated, extended, magnificent home, bearing traces of the past, a project for the future. Time is approached in its aspects of framing the analytic situation, in the variety it imparts to subjective experiences, and also as a thematic element of the associative material produced under analysis. Interpersonal relationships are mainly addressed from the perspective of the effects of the pandemic and confinement on transferential/countertransferential relationships in the remote analysis situation. Finally, interpretative hypotheses are proposed for two opposing attitudes: arrogant denialism and obsessive care and precaution. Both are suggested to derive from infantile fantasies of omnipotence.