Can We Hug? The vibrancy and vicissitudes of patients in person: Sifting through the rubble of Covid

ABSTRACT

This article sets forth how the dual influences of the shared emotional trauma of the pandemic plus the structure of the two dimensionality of remote analytic work led to triumphant first meetings when we returned to an in-person setting. I deconstruct the cascade of assaults on our lifestyles and our psyches resulting from the forced lockdown during the Covid pandemic. The paper braids together two unexpectedly affecting experiences of meeting in-person in 2022 and 2023 against the backdrop of the pandemic. One was with an individual patient and the other was with a class of advanced analytic candidates. I describe how, at long last, having the opportunity to meet our patients, students, and colleagues again elicited profound and overwhelming feelings, from anxiety and self-consciousness to delight and joy.

KEYWORDS:

• Countertransference
• Covid pandemic
• healing
• New York City
• remote work
• trauma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valerie R. Frankfeldt

Valerie R. Frankfeldt, PhD, is a training analyst, faculty member and supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center. She is the former Director of Training at PPSC, and a Certified Imago Relationship Therapist. She has a special interest in the myriad ways, both positive and negative, that technology plays in shaping relationships both in the treatment setting and in society in today’s world. She is a graduate of the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and of the New Directions Writing Program out of the Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is in private practice in NYC seeing individuals and doing clinical consultation.