Psychoanalysis during the COVID-19 pandemic: Several reflections on countertransference

Abstract

The article highlights and illustrates several reflections on countertransference observed in the author’s private psychoanalytic practice in Ukraine during the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding. The specific psychoanalyst’s difficulties presented, associated with forgetting planned sessions, resistance to change setting agreements, becoming ‘deaf’ to transference, libidinal disinvestment, ‘loss in advance’ and ‘the dead mother’ countertransference, are discussed in the context of the situation with the novel coronavirus in Ukraine. The author has formulated several hypotheses for observed changes in countertransference in relation to disinvestment, regression, work of denial and work of grief due to real losses, as well as the possible previous distortions of psychoanalytic stance. Consideration, analysis and acceptance of the above-mentioned countertransference experience allowed for the observation of various patients’ responses towards it and made it possible to continue clinical work, studying the new aspects of the psychoanalytic process from the revised viewpoints.