Total Pageviews

Sunday, August 16, 2020

COVID Chronicles Denial is Not Just a River in Egypt

 


 

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, it flows right through the heart of the River City, and through the heart of the President of our University.  Not only has he ordered us back into school starting Monday, but, according to the Provost, he has ordered staff who could work from home to man (or woman or other) their desks – citing our motto, “All for One, and One for All.”

 

I think this is a terribly flawed reading of the Motto.  Any additional person who comes onto campus increases the already high risk that we will become a super-spreader site.  Supporting our co-workers involves, I believe, working from home whenever possible to decrease the amount of time that we spend exposing ourselves to each other and having ourselves and the students social distance – as well as wear masks – on a consistent basis and practice good hygiene.

 

The reason that the President and his cabinet have made this choice is, I believe, the result of Denial.  We have been learning about the defense mechanism Denial and how it differs from Repression in our lab meetings where we are learning how to use the Defense Mechanism Rating Scale in some work that we are doing with recorded analyses.

 

In repression, we are aware of the event, or in this case the risk, but we don’t think through the consequences.  We don’t put things together.  Now certainly, on one level, that is going on.  But I think that the flawed logic occurs because of Denial, which leads us to not be aware of the event, or in this case the risk, because to be aware of it would be too threatening to us.

 

If the President of a Jesuit, Catholic University – who is also a Catholic Priest – were to order people to work and students coming to class knowing that this order could damage or even kill them, and know that it was on in the interests of the “Greater Good”, this would cause that person and his cabinet (he has refused to let faculty weigh in on this decision) great distress.  In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, we have been asked by those speaking about Catholic Social Teaching to pray for the moral injury that people like our President will suffer as a result of making decisions that cause harm to others (though, interestingly, they did not implore people like our President not to make injurious decisions).

 

This week, I also received some information from a task force of the American Psychoanalytic Association with a discussion of guidelines for returning to in-person treatment, something that most people at this point are not doing.  The guidelines are remarkably clear that this decision it one that the analyst or therapist should make – it is not one that should be negotiated between an analyst or a therapist and their client – this is a decision that the treater should make based on their being responsible for the safety of the patients with whom they work.

 

This is at variance with our usual way of working where, when a patient asks a question, we are frequently likely to say, “It’s up to you.”   It is also at variance with our usual way of working because, as the guidelines point out, we are generally creating a collaborative space.  But the COVID reality is that I can harm you and you can harm me, so we should not share the same space.  To keep you safe, and to protect me, we need to be at a distance from each other.

 

Though they don’t say it, I think this is actually just putting more weight under our usual ambivalence about connecting with others.  There is always the fear that we will harm or be harmed by having others close to us.  I think that is a psychoanalytic, and I think a realistic human reality, but I don’t think it is part of our usual advertised experience of college.  “These will be the best years of your life,” is what we advertise in our brochures and on our campus visits.  And mine, in many ways, were.  But they were also filled with a great deal of angst.  That angst is actually part of what made them such wonderful years – but explaining how that works isn’t going to fit in one of our quick quips that become the fodder of selling students on coming to college.  And the angst of being close to others but unable to embrace them in the ways that we generally do may be more angst causing – and may lead them to embrace despite our admonitions.

 

So, I think that in psychoanalysis and in higher education, we emphasize the collaborative nature of the relationship between analyst and analysand and teacher and student.  But the negative is always there.  The analysand is anxious about exposing themselves to the analyst, and the student is concerned about being negatively evaluated by the professor.

 

But COVID concretizes the risk.  And COVID, at least according to the analysts, gives a responsibility to those who allow contact to happen to assess the risk involved and determine whether or not the contact should take place.  At my institute, we unanimously agreed that having students sit in class together for hours at a time put them (and the rest of the population) at risk and we will only be teaching online for the foreseeable future.

 

Our Provost is reserving the decision of when to pivot, if we need to, to across the board on-line learning, for the executive team to make.  She has decided that there will not be a dashboard of information about cases, but that this information will only be available to the decision makers.  She says that if fifty students contract the illness at an event and they can all be isolated this may be less problematic than 40 students contracting the illness from unknown sources.  I follow that, but this information could, I think, be included in a dashboard.  I think she fears that faculty will independently pivot and only offer their courses in an on-line format.  Has she considered the possibility that we might be more likely to do that in the absence of objective information?

 

I am also concerned that Denial is present among the faculty.  But I am also reconsidering whether this is Denial.  I think it may be splitting – on the part of the faculty and the administrators.  They have said that our county is currently in a pretty good place in terms of new cases.  That is good news.  Unfortunately that is largely irrelevant as our students are arriving from forty nine states and over forty countries.  And they are coming through a variety of portals – including airports and, I don’t doubt, bus terminals.

 

In splitting, for what it is worth, we are alternately aware of the threat, and then not aware of it.  When we think of the difficulty – the world is a dark and dangerous place.  But when we think of how lovely the world can be, we forget about the dangers.  All is forgiven and all is good. 

 

When my son’s school was considering being open, they intended to quarantine students from high risk areas for two weeks.  We have no such plan.  I will be in class tomorrow with students who have come from multiple places.  I will be teaching some of them, though some of them will not be in the class room but on zoom because the room is not large enough to hold them all at what is considered to be a safe social distance.  I will be wearing a mask as will those in the room.  Those on zoom will be unmasked but also not present.

 

This is called a split classroom, and keeping everyone engaged will be tough.  On Friday, I met with 15 or so First Year Students in an orientation meeting.  They were all masked and I was on zoom (this was offered as an option – I was told by my chair that not teaching in person was not likely to be approved if I requested it because it was for my health – and the health of my students – not for pedagogical reasons).  I could not hear the students.  I hope that my students, both those in the room and those on zoom, will be able to hear me tomorrow.  I hope I will be able to hear them and they will be able to hear each other.  We will see….

 

I am hoping that my angst is misplaced.  I am hoping that our measures will lead us to all coming sailing through this with flying colors.  I continue to believe that if we all wear masks, we can beat this thing.

 

Wish me luck.


To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 


To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.


 For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

No comments:

Post a Comment

The Covenant of Water: Is it a Great Book?

 Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Diversity, Quality Is The Covenant of Water a Great Book?   Abraham Vergh...