If we want to live forever, we must continue to adapt ourselves to environment and our environment must adapt to ourselves. Further, we must be able to predict and anticipate those adaptations that will be necessary in the future.

Roger Money-Kyrle, 1931.

   I believe Money-Kyrle’s statement is a praise of both flexibility and rigour and can

 be valid for psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in the age of coronavirus.

   Although the emergency cannot be foreseen by definition, and abstract and general rules of conduct 

cannot be prescribed a priori, its ongoing dynamics can be experienced and studied as an experiment of an

 extraordinary and exceptional dimension. This experiment can provide useful working trough tools not only 

for when there will be a return to a relative daily life, although not superimposable to the daily life preceding 

the exceptional crisis, but also to gain an experiential endowment that could be used in any subsequent emergency states.

   Although the coronavirus outbreak is perceptible as a novelty of extraordinary evidence and intensity that breaks 

the usual parameters regulating our relationships, including the analytical relationship, it is however accompanied 

by aspects of continuity with some situations of the recent past that have forced upon us tiring reflections.   

   Many emerging phenomena have anticipated and accompanied this historical phase, have entered the hard core of 

mental experience, and have begun to remodel the unconscious transactions among human beings in new and often 

dramatic ways. Examples of these phenomena are: economic globalisation, the internet and new media, time-space 

compression and change in communications.

   However, I don’t think that all these phenomena can assume overwhelming cataclysmic dimensions. Further, 

I believe that we should become erratic in our reflection. Our in-progress reflections require us to continuously 

question an uncertain and evasive reality, plural and ambivalent, and of how every individual dwells and lives in it. 

We need a discreet doubtfulness between flexibility and caution, a sort of anti-cynical and naive scepticism, 

aiming at decomposing and interpreting what is changing in the world.

   Bion (1963, p. 86) stress the importance “(...) to achieve naivety of outlook when a problem is so overlaid by 

experience that its outlines have become blurred and its possible solutions obscure. (...)The ability of an analyst to retain 

the substance of his training and experience and yet achieve a naďf  view of his work allows him to discover for himself 

and in his own way the knowledge gained from the predecessors”. 

   I think it is only apparently reassuring to appeal to the past in order to quiet feelings of disorientation, 

indefiniteness, and uncertainty about life in this historical phase. It would mean to act as laudatores temporis acti 

(people who praise past times), as Horatius  (Ars poetica, 173) called those old men unable to accept the newness 

of the present. In this sense, I think that trying to explain this disorientation only by appealing to a certain number 

of “holy books” or the force of tradition is an anti-economic psychic operation.

   Erik H. Erikson (1964, p. 125) writes: “Fidelity is the ability to sustain loyalties freely pledged in 

spite of the inevitable contradictions of value systems”.

   However, continuously appealing to an obsolete worldview (or, at least, refusing to update a world 

view to the socio-cultural complexity with which it should deal) is not fidelity at all, but only a sort of a 

totally uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy leading us to “howl with the wolves” (Freud, 1921).

   I want to bring to mind a famous quote by the philosopher Bernard of Chartres (the attribution to Bernard 

is by Archbishop John of Salisbury (see his Metalogicon, III, 4): Nos sumus sicut nanus positus super humeros gigantis. 

“Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out 

that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, 

but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature” (John of Salisbury, 1159).

  I think that is ethical, cultural, and therapeutic for the psychoanalyst to consider and understand 

how in the extraordinary situations it is important to enlarge the “gravitational field” in which the relationships 

between analysand, therapist and world define and place themselves (Chianese, 2005).

   The separation from our theoretical and clinical certainties can provoke feelings of pain and confusion, as well as inadequacy.

 However, we must avoid, as certain characters in science fiction, having analysts live laterally and in parallel, 

and propose these lives to their analysands. These spaces are invisible and inaccessible and only resemble the space of history 

and life. We must take care not to contrast a globalised time and space with a slow-paced and nostalgic past. 

I think we cannot start an improbable, and today (the days of pandemic) impossible, search for lost time. 

We can find a similar sterile juxtaposition in discussions about football. 

On the one hand there are supporters of a slow sport mostly based on individual technique and fantasy, 

and on the other supporters of a muscular, fast sport that lacks fantasy.

   I believe that it is right to pay attention to the intense and confused life style changes and to those vectors of change 

that quickly modify their trajectories in transitional emergency situations. However, in doing so, we must be able 

to attach the right importance to those social behaviours that deny both belonging and absence in an omnipotent manner.

 This means not drawing catastrophic conclusions such as “everything has changed” or, on the contrary, 

comforting conclusions such as “nothing has really changed”. I think we should exercise John Keat’s 

“Negative Capacity”, recalled by Bion, and stay in the middle between continuity and discontinuity, 

by avoiding the defensive doctrinal dogmatism and by following Bion’s famous dictum “without memory or desire”. 

Thus, we should trust a possible creative response of our Unconscious and not look for redemption 

or rest in a dream of belonging to the traditional setting, felt as absolute and impossible to modify 

without degrading the analytic relationship.

   Francesco Barale (2003) rightly argues that psychoanalysts should avoid reacting to this turbulence 

by adopting fundamentalism or implicitly normative positions.

   The analyst should accept a certain degree of indeterminacy and the consequent suffering 

and consider himself as a bricoleur who has a tool kit for assembling various parts of different 

clinical experiences (Lévi-Strauss's metaphor of the potter as the craftsman for our modern way of arranging knowledge), 

and theories are tools, as Wittgenstein (1953) says (Stein, 1995).  

This means, by starting from well-known perspectives, that he must be able to open the ways 

to new relational and cognitive routes via a careful selection of the different theories and settings at his disposal 

and new ways of making experiences. A do-it-yourself analyst must refer to a polyphonic concept of identity, 

conceive it as something nomadic (or, at least, as something more nomadic than in the past), 

and inscribe it in circular patterns representing weak, changeable, and various expressive forms. 

They are temporary identities, perhaps preparatory to more stable ones, but certainly authentic and 

sustained by mutual relationships.

   Lucien Israël (1994, p. 33) writes: “In psychoanalysis, the rules, whatever they are, must be called into question 

and put thorough a theoretical and situational re-elaboration work. This work allows preventing us to worship the rules 

and losing their living meaning”.

   The temporary modifiacation of the traditional setting can be useful in some extraordinary situations, 

like that in which we are now living, and it has not the meaning os deregulation, 

that is the use of autharchic and non respectful applications of the technical rules of the analytic setting 

and relationship. The institution of ductile or rigid rules is in relation with the way the third, 

the law is represented in the analytic relationship.

“Taking note of these external factors in our institutions and in our private practice should not necessarily imply adaptive 

and passive flattening towards these factors. However, this attitude could promote a process of slow and painful rethinking

 and mourning of past positions, characterized by a certain narcissism and closure towards the surrounding social reality, 

which were typical of certain historical periods of psychoanalysis” (Kluzer, 2001, p. 114).

   The transition to new rules, albeit transitory and pending the progressive restoration of the traditional setting,

 obviously calls into question the relationship that the group of analysts has established with the historical 

figures of reference and with the founding myths and it involves organizational, cultural, and political aspects. 

Rather than being defensively perched in some areas of sacredness, the group should function as a sufficiently structured, 

yet fluid and dynamic apparatus, capable of tolerating the changes required by the changed historical conditions 

both external and internal. In this sense, we can neither propose a bold defence of the original rules 

and worship them or follow them in a bureaucratic and obsessive way, nor dissolve our identities thanks to the absence 

of any peremptory value. 

   We need to refer to different  sets of theories, to the plurality and complexity of our current horizons in continuous 

and productive evolution, to assemble them in an adequate metatheoretic context and to compare them 

with the immediate clinical experience, that disrupts and continually reassembles the theoretical attitudes. 

The continuous rethinking and recalibration of one's own technique helps to lighten it by the micro-illusions 

of heuristic omnipotence and introduces fruitful problematizations on the angle that we generally tend to adopt.

    Of course, the point here is neither to defend a rough clinical-theoretical eclecticism, nor to invite to assume a sort of

 omnipotent intuitiveness, nor to avoid reflecting on the compatibility or incompatibility between different theoretical

 models and clinical settings, for instance on what can be lost and what can be maintained in the remote analysis.  

Rather, the point is to propose a way of theorising both rigorous and free floating; a way that is deep and temporary,

 made not only of continuities and juxtapositions, but also of breaks and contrasts between different models.

REFERENCES

Barale, F. (2003). Normale Caos dell’Amore: Corpo, Edipo e Sexualtheorie all’Epoca della Modernitŕ Liquida, Psiche, 1: 19-32.

Bion, W. R. (1963). Elements of Psycho-analysis. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Chianese, D. (2005). L’Infelicitŕ nella Civiltŕ, Psiche, 2: 11-17.

Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and Responsibility. New York: Norton.

Freud, S. (1921c). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S. E., 18: 69. London: Hogarth.

Israël, L. (1994). Spécificité(s) de la Formation Analytique. EPF Bulletin, 42: 31-39.

Money-Kyrle, R. E. (1931). The Remote Consequences of Psychoanalysis on Individual, Social and Instinctive Behaviour, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 11: 173-193.

Stein, R. (1995). Reply to Chodorow, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5• 301-310.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. G. E. M. Anscombe (Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.