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Epilogue: Writing a New Playbook: Confronting Theoretical and Clinical Challenges of the Twin Pandemics of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism

It is now the end of 2020, as this Epilogue is written – over nine months (March 19, 2020) since we have officially been immersed in this pandemic that has claimed three times the number of U.S. soldiers who died in WWI, and topping the death toll of 9/11; seven months since the brutal murder of George Floyd (May 25, 2020); six weeks since the election (Nov. 4, 2020) of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and just days since the roll-out of effective vaccines for SARS COVID-19. By any measure, we have been living and working in an altered reality. Essays by Adrienne Harris and Alison Howard, based on their original presentations at the beginning of May, 2020, serve as catalysts for compelling discussions of the intersection of race, class and the state, and its impact on the clinical encounter and the person of the analyst. Taking up these themes, Jones powerfully locates her perspective, as one “of contagion – an ongoing unilluminated experiential space with risks that amplify the dangers of COVID-19 and alters the nature of my worldview. In this location potential victims of the virus go to work and attempt to write psychoanalytically carving new spaces in these locations to think, while recognizing anew the fear of breathing in the presence of others” (p. 394). How does the contagion of virus equalize the possibility of victimhood (or does it) as we relate to our patients through screens, a medium of (global) connection, yet, at the same time, an interface that generally creates greater distance and distortion? The inextricable relationship between COVID-19 and systemic racism weaves throughout this issue, taken up by each contributor and articulated in their particular voice. Harris and Howard confront us with the challenges of working in a health crisis that, with the death of George Floyd and the disparity in death toll, brought systemic racism into high relief. With an eye to the clinical and societal struggles we face, Harris contends that “none of us can say, anymore, that we don’t know how” (p. 375) to dismantle white-centrism and racism. Harris highlights four aspects of clinical and individual experience that are universally experienced during this pandemic: