Lockdown Therapy

Book excerpt: Nominated as an IAJS Book Award Finalist 2023! This fascinating volume explores — from the perspective both of analysts and their patients—how the COVID-19 pandemic quickly and unexpectedly created profound and lasting changes in the ways psychoanalysis is conducted, and what those changes mean for analysis moving forward. The first part of the book is made up of interviews conducted by Stefano Carpani with authoritative authors in analytical psychology during the earliest phase of lockdown, centered on themes of the pandemic, lockdown, and how each individual was coping with the challenges those circumstances brought on. The second part features personal essays that further details the subjective experiences of Jungian analysts and therapists worldwide, comprising a collection of reflections on how COVID-19 affected and changed the way analysts work with patients. These reflections focus on the theoretical, clinical, technical, and also practical points of view, including clinical materials on transference and counter-transference considerations. The third part of the book is specular to the second and offers reflections from patients’ perspective on how the pandemic changed their therapies and lockdown affected their experience of therapy. Patients have provided anonymous testimonies through their writing of how they experienced of the change of setting, mindset and related implications. A comprehensive overview of an important and ongoing conversation, Lockdown Therapy is crucial reading for Jungian analysts and scholars, as well as other clinicians training in analysis, psychotherapy and counselling.