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.
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