Shared Catastrophe, Resistance, and Learning in the Countertransference.

In light of the 2020-2021 pandemic and consequent necessity for radical changes in psychoanalytic treatment, the author discusses transference-countertransference, resistance, and the analytic setting, among other themes. In particular, the author explores how elements of regression induced in patient and analyst during times of external challenge sometimes obscures elements of unconscious conflict and fantasy that analysis mobilizes and can help to elucidate. He explores an element of the analyst's work with his own resistance to learning about what this catastrophe means psychologically to our patients and to those trying to help them. Three illustrative clinical vignettes are present and discussed.

The empty couch: Love and mourning in times of confinement.

This paper describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a woman patient during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the setting was profoundly disrupted and was transferred from in-person psychoanalysis to telephone sessions. Drawing on Bleger's formulations on the construction of the analytic frame and on André Green's on the function of the framing structure in the construction and elaboration of phantasy life, the case study shows how, in the absence of the physicality of the setting, the most primitive anxieties about the symbiotic relationship with the mother were expressed and contained in the transference and countertransference in the analysis. The author offers some considerations about the notion of "background of the uncanny", derived from Yolanda Gampel, which draws attention to the challenges when both patient and analyst are inserted into the same traumatic wider context. It is suggested that the production of an art object by the patient during this period represents a step in the elaboration of the work of mourning and towards symbolization.

Flexibility in Treatment: A Trial of Walking Psychotherapy.

Flexibility in the psychotherapeutic frame of treatment arises from many sources, from the general to the personal, and can take several forms. This article looks at walking while conducting psychotherapy with patients and explores the ways in which flexibility in treatment can enhance the alliance, how walking side by side brings the body into focus with its implications for transference and countertransference, and how associations to landscape evoke past memories and access emotions. Issues relating to self-disclosure and boundaries, as well as patient responses to the psychotherapist's personally driven request to consider walking during psychotherapy are addressed. Since writing this article, the coronavirus pandemic has swept across the world and required psychotherapists everywhere to bend the frame of treatment and meet with patients virtually-by phone or video conference-to maintain social distancing and prevent the spread of infection. The hardships posed by this shift in treatment frame combine with benefits not dissimilar to those found with psychotherapy while walking.

Online/Cyber Counseling Services in the COVID-19 Outbreak: Are They Really New?

Online/cyber counseling has been named as the best way to offer counseling services during the COVID-19 outbreak. The purpose of this article is to explore the use of online/cyber counseling during the COVID-19 outbreak to solve psychological problems. The author examines the history and concepts, the therapeutic relationship, transference and countertransference, the advantages along with the disadvantages, considerations, implications, and curriculum for online/cyber counseling during COVID-19 outbreak.