COVID, Moral violence, Great Resignation, After Effects
Despite having intentionally documented my experience of the
pandemic, my memory of these times is spotty.
Time has taken on a fluid quality.
I have been called for jury duty this week – but don’t have to accept it
if I have sat on a jury within the past two years. It feels very recent that I was called for
duty, so I thought I might not have to serve this week, but then I realized it
couldn’t have been in the past two years because COVID protocols were not in
place when I served. While time has
always been a little slippery for me, in this case it is as if the intervening
two years didn’t happen, and what happened before is almost continuous with
what is going on now.
As I speculated about the way time has become fluid, I began
to wonder about whether COVID and the attendant isolation and uncertainty has led
to massive regression among both the students and the faculty at my University. This regression is similar to that of a psychoanalysis
(or, in some cases, a marriage). In a
psychoanalysis, there is an intentional regression. The analyst is both present – meeting four
times a week – but also not present in certain ways, creating space for the
analysand to immerse him or herself in their own thoughts and following them to
wherever they might lead. This, in turn,
allows the analysand to feel more and more like earlier versions of themselves
and as aspects of themselves re-emerge that can be examined (analyzed), the
analysand can reconsider how to integrate those aspects of themselves into
their current functioning.
During the pandemic, in an oddly similar kind of
interpersonal isolation, regression occurred.
Our students came to class – at least they turned on their computers
and, especially on the undergraduate level, they then frequently turned off
their microphones and their cameras and listened and watched – or wandered off –
frequently when I called on a student they simply wouldn’t respond. The students also didn’t interact with each
other before and during class the ways that they usually did when we were in
person. One of the characteristics that
facilitates and is fueled by a regression is that our defenses become more and
more relaxed. Stuff bubbles up out of us
– and we are more vulnerable to things around us, e.g. the influence of the
analyst. So it is important for analysts
to be cautious as they work with patients in this vulnerable state.
In a Zoom meeting with faculty members from across campus to
discuss the current bad morale on campus, we agree that the proximal cause is
COVID. But the distal seem to be related
to a longstanding malaise that was simply brought to a headd by COVID. In the meeting, an article was referenced that
talks about moral
violence as a lynch pin of morale issues.
This article was recommended by a faculty member and it suggests that
when we feel complicit in morally compromising actions, we experience trauma –
though I would add that this creates internal conflict and turmoil.
Often we think of things that are traumatic as things that
happen to us, but we are also traumatized by what we do. An extreme example is the experience of killing
another human – something our veterans have often experience as traumatic and
that is often as much or more the focus of treating PTSD as the experience of
being powerless in battle. Sometimes we
fear what is done to us, but often we fear what we are capable of doing.
During the pandemic, when we were in this imagined state of
regression and our defenses were relaxed, we were confronted by our institutional
and cultural complicity in subjugation of other humans (George Floyd) and our
complicity in the degradation of the planet (Climate Change). Just as things are returning to “normal” we were
reminded that we are warlike creatures who are capable of more immediate
destruction (Ukraine).
At the University, I was first confronted with my moral
complicity in institutional subjugation when I was hired and realized that
scholarships are referred to internally as discounts. They are then awarded to students who will
improve our standing as an institution and other, less well prepared students
pay more for a similar education but profit from the institutional prestige afforded
by being in the classroom with the better prepared “discount” students when
they graduate. This initial complicity has
been followed by being privy and complicit– both by virtue of serving in quasi
administrative roles (e.g. Department Chair), also as a psychological
consultant called in to various messes on campus over the years- and in various other actions on campus.
To be clear – being a faculty member is the best gig
imaginable. The admissions office lines
up a cadre of students who arrive eager to engage with me about the things that
I am most passionate about. Could you
ask for a better job? Well, OK, if I
didn’t have to do grading – if I didn’t have to teach the classes about which
my passion is less intense – if I didn’t have to run the tenure and promotion
gauntlets, but come on – I have academic freedom! I have been able to research what interests
me, to pursue analytic training, to teach others how to do psychoanalytic
therapy and administer the Rorschach, and I have engaged with undergraduates
about how the mind works – this is great stuff.
But I have also been witness to and infected by
institutional pathologies. Anxieties
about survival. Decisions that are
expedient but morally questionable. The Great
Resignation is a sign of discontent on the part of the populace. We have experienced our own version of that
not just in my department, but I have experienced it in my soul, including by
choosing to go back into the classroom to teach before it was safe to do that
and by teaching in a split zoom room even though I knew that teaching was going
to be largely ineffective. And I think
the morally questionable decisions are a significant aspect of that sense of
resignation.
I remember the Dean telling me after a particular battle I
lost as chair not to take it personally and that you win some and you lose
some. I understand this metaphor as it
applies to sports. There is a better
team – or better player – on any given day.
He did not understand that I was seeing the battle not as something that
was good for me if I won and bad if I lost, but something that involved right
versus wrong. The faculty in my
department, and the students in their classes were going to suffer as a result
of the decision. I had failed to make
this clear – otherwise why would the administration have made the decision that
they did? Objectively I don’t know that this
was the case, but subjectively it certainly felt that it was.
How do we live in a complex, interdependent society where
our membership makes us complicit in activities that we find morally
repugnant? What obligation does that put
us under? And what strain? How can we manage to not know what we need to
not know so that we can avoid paralysis that would prevent us from working on
that which we can contribute to? How can
we, collectively and individually, work on restructuring the social order so
that it works to our collective benefit?
We need to manage our individual anxiety in order to do that – we need
to rely on a belief that we are working collectively towards the greater
good. We need, in a word, to have
faith. But we also, and here I hate to
quote Ronald Reagan of all people, but we need to trust but verify that things
are being attended to.
I think that people may have “forgotten” what occurred
during the flu pandemic for many reasons.
I think just being isolated and taken out of the normal routine creates
a kind of separate reality – and this reality is easily lost as the new normal
moves back in. We say, in effect, "It was just a blip – it wasn’t
real". But I also think that we may have
been confronted, in both pandemics, with aspects of ourselves and decisions
that we made that we would just as soon forget – to let the lost years be, from
one end to the other, a forgotten couple of years. Freud talked about amnesia for our earliest
years that was based on our being uncomfortable with remembering that we are
mammals with what are currently repugnant strivings. In fact, infantile amnesia is more
complicated than that, but we might apply his logic to our experience of the
pandemic – and to our experience of other morally repugnant parts of our lives
(our fear of how fragile we are), as things
that are better forgotten.
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