Encountering the Coronavirus

As the coronavirus spreads across the world, it also spreads across our social media platforms, news apps, desktops, and TV screens.  We are each contending with a variety of difficult thoughts and feelings the virus arouses.  Whether or not we've been touched by the virus physiologically, there's a way we've all become infected by the virus in other ways.  I think there’s something we might learn from construing our relation to the virus as one of an “encounter.”  
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To encounter something is to meet something as an adversary or enemy or to come upon or experience something especially unexpectedly (Merriam-Webster, online).  ​

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​I think "encounter" is the best way of considering our relation to the virus because it is not exclusive to any particular kind of impact, and it does not presume any particular emotional valence attached to our various experiences (e.g., fright, anger, panic, etc.).  I think there are three broad ways that might characterize the kinds of encounters we can have: 1) Looking Out, 2) Looking Up, and 3) Looking In.  ​I would describe these encounters as “movements” or “positions” of our psyche-in-relation-to-the-world at any given time.  They are like lenses through which we filter our experience of the world at any given moment.  They organize our perceptions, influence our feelings, and guide our actions.  In describing them as movements, I hope to convey the idea that they are dynamic, always in process, and subject to change.  I also mean to foreshadow what I believe to be a kind of “solution” to the anxiety and terror this pandemic can generate for many of us.

​Three Types of Encounter
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1.  Looking Out

• ​​We pause thinking and dedicate our efforts to matters of survival. We find ourselves consumed by matters of survival and ask questions like: “What will happen if I, or someone I love, gets the coronavirus?”  “Will I lose my job?”  “How will our economy ever recover?”  We are suddenly running to buy more food, toilet paper, and bare essentials out of our panic to survive.  We are looking out for ourselves and our families to ensure our continued survival.  The benefit is that we survive; the liability is that we may not enjoy the life we have struggled so hard to preserve.

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2.  Looking Up

• ​We look for opportunities contained in this outbreak in an effort to transcend it.  We wonder how this terrible event will bring new possibilities.  We ask ourselves questions like: “How can we make something good out of this tragedy?” or “Although it seems disastrous, what good things might be hidden in disguise by this virus?”  We look towards hope and possibility for comfort and search for hidden opportunities that are disguised by the tragedy.  There is intrinsic benefit to this hopeful stance, yet it becomes dangerous when it is overly idealistic as it risks keeping us from taking adaptive precautions.  At its extreme, it can become moralistic.  We can privilege hope and optimism at the expense of recognizing the reality of fear and terror surrounding the virus.​

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3.  Looking In

• ​We become philosophical, asking ourselves questions and attempting to make meaning of what we encounter.  We begin asking: “How might we understand the impact and meaning of this event?”  “What will the future of the world look like in response to this global pandemic?”  “What might this mean for me and/or my family and the ways we live our lives in the world?”  This option is beneficial in that it opens us up where things might have before felt constrained and closed.  (In many ways, this article might be understood as, itself, an expression of this encounter; however, I hope to be saying something more nuanced.)  Though opening and becoming curious are intrinsically valuable endeavors, the risk with this option is that it may be too intellectual and divorced from our bodies and experience of emotion.  We can become paralyzed to inaction by obsessive thinking and consideration.

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The most threatening aspect of the coronavirus (as far as our mental health is concerned) is its tranquilizing effect on our capacity to flexibly inhabit a variety of alternative states of mind.

​Tyranny of the Singular
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​​The crucial point I most want to emphasize is this: regardless of which position we are most inhabiting, we must strive to remain open to the full range of mental states we might inhabit in our experience of the coronavirus.  When any one position predominates, our capacity to even recognize the presence of alternatives dissolves and, with it, our peace within and with one another, our flexibility of thought, and our sanity.  

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​The coronavirus becomes an object of overwhelming fear and panic to the extent that it becomes the exclusive organizing narrative in our minds.  As we become bombarded by story after story of the coronavirus and its nebulous and mortal influence, it begins to calcify and setup like concrete.  If the essence of health is flexibility of thought – the capacity to stand between the spaces of various self-states (Bromberg, 1996) – the most threatening aspect of the coronavirus (as far as our mental health is concerned) is its tranquilizing effect on our capacity to flexibly inhabit a variety of alternative states of mind.  
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​Just as we are sheltering-in-place physically, there’s a way in which our minds can become sheltered in place.  And this kind of psychic sheltering-in-place is the antithesis of flexibility and multiplicity that constitute mental health and flourishing.  The dominance of the singular theme of the Coronavirus tranquilizes movement in our thought.  The virus becomes the way the world is instead of a temporary way aspects of our world have become in response to a complicated set of circumstances at this time and place in history.  We need to refurnish our internal world with the rest of the features that animate life to which we have selectively inattended in our preoccupation with the pandemic.  

​Now what?

​What might all of this mean on a more practical level?  I think it can mean different things for each of us.  It might mean that we need to appreciate other aspects of the world we live in right now: the quality of our relationships, the pursuit of our hobbies, enjoying our play activities, engaging our work.  We might need to enjoy our physical bodies and ground ourselves in appreciating the physical health we do enjoy in its many varieties.  We might need to re-examine our sense of spirituality, journal, fix up the house, clean, or bake a cake.  It might mean we need to recruit our collective memory in the service of contextualizing this pandemic according to other times our world has suffered from pestilence, tragedy, and economic instability.  We might need to remember that in the past other solutions have been found and other epochs of ailment have transpired and, finally, expired.  

​Whatever practical application we might employ must  be understood as, in some sense, an effort to keep the proverbial psychic "ball rolling."  Much like keeping our coughs from becoming dry, we must keep our internal chain oiled and the concrete from setting.  
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References

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Bromberg, P.M. (1996). Standing in the Spaces: the multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32, 509-535.

“Encounter”, Merriam-Webster Online, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/encounter, Accessed 15 April, 2020.
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About the author

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Tyson Davis, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at Glen Forest Psychological Services, LLC.  He specializes in helping individuals and couples dig deeper to make lasting transformation in their lives.  Tyson has a special interest in the study of personality development and psychoanalytic psychotherapy for individuals and couples. ​​​

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