Covid Chronicles XXXII. What are the lingering effects for particular cohorts?

 Covid's long term effects; covid's impact on relationships; hook up culture; relational fears, psychoanalytic theory building, psychoanalysis and social science

I met with a supervisee for the first time yesterday (in September of 2026).  She works with college age kids and she has noticed some significant shifts in their behavior in their behavior.  We traced those shifts, in our musings, to the isolation of sheltering place during Covid.  I thought I would share our very idiosyncratic thoughts that are based on a convenience sample and some wild speculation.  I do this not so much for the particulars of our observations or our speculations, but because I think that the impact of social events on the functioning of people, including our patients, is something that we have been increasingly drawn to look at, and the arc of the Covid lockdown and its lingering effects is one such place that calls aspects of traditional psychoanalytic ideology into question – opening it to connect with other fields that observe human behavior.

As I age, the people that I treat have aged with me.  Some of that is because I engage in longer term treatments and some of my patients have been with me for years, but also because the base of people who refer to me – my peers and my patient’s peers – have been aging right along with me and their contacts are older.  A big chunk of my caseload currently are Medicare cases.  So I have grown out of touch with the college population – a population that I used to treat directly and then supervised the work of graduate students as they treated this population.

This new supervisee, who is immersed in the treatment of college students, suggested that, post-Covid, the functioning of students at a large state University has changed considerably since she was a student not so very long ago.  Where once Wednesday through Saturday nights were considered party nights and students spent them surfing from bar to bar and occasionally including frat house or other parties in the loop, the dominant entertainment now involves staying in with friends – largely on Friday and/or Saturday nights.

The supervisee and I agreed that this not necessarily a bad development – indeed, on the surface, we welcome it.  Isn’t it better to develop close and deep relationships and shouldn’t we be done with the hook up culture?  But leave it to analytically oriented thinkers to consider other possibilities – specifically that these students are afraid to connect with peers who are strangers.

As we thought about that possibility, we imagined what this cohort lost during the Pandemic.  We imagined them to be in 9^th and maybe 10^th grade then, and imagined that they were working from home during a particular developmental epoch.  This epoch is the period that immediately follows middle school.  Middle school for the two of us, members of very different cohorts, was a terribly difficult period, and I remembered a study from my high school days where the researchers proposed that 99% of middle schoolers felt that they were not part of the in-group.

At the time, I was skeptical of the assertion that virtually everyone experienced themselves as an outcast, so I approached one of the people that I just knew had been one of the cool kids in middle school and asked her about her experience.  Sure enough, she stated that she did not believe that she had been in the in group at all.

Now, as I said at the outset, I don’t think we should use this very anecdotal information as the basis for anything like policy or as a basis for a particular theory about this cohort, but it didn’t stop the supervisee and me from putting these “facts” together with her observation of the shift in behavior for some? Many? Certainly not all, but a significant portion of individuals in this cohort compared to previous ones.  

Based on our conjecture, lived experience and ancient statistical and anecdotal data, we wondered if the healing impact of the transition to high school, where some of the jostling for position dies down and people find peers that they connect with and begin to experience themselves (as a collective whole – there are huge individual differences here) as more competent and, importantly, confident in their ability to connect with others – in a word – to trust them and, if others fail them, to trust in their own self esteem to see them through a difficult encounter until they can make it to the safe waters of a friendship where they can process the annoyance of someone trying to shame them.

Without the healing magic of being able to connect with a coterie of like-minded friends or pals as Harry Stack Sullivan would call them, they may be trying to catch up by identifying such folks later and hanging out with them, or they may have missed an opportunity to do that and they may be particularly susceptible to the current mass (social) media fed concerns about the malevolent intent of anyone who is not immediately known or kin.

Objectively, I do not put much stock in these musings, though I am subjectively attached to them enough to subject you to them, but I do this in service of what I hope will be a greater good.  Psychoanalysis has long suffered from overgeneralizing from the individual to the masses and from Freud’s over identification with Darwinian principles of selection and the assumption that we are all sprung from the same biological roots and playing those out in our development.  From this perspective, developmental hurdles like the Oedipal complex are universal and determined by the infant, not by the configuration of caregivers that they encounter. 

We, as a discipline, should continue to be open to modifying our theories based not just on who happens to be lying on our couch (even thought these speculations arise in large measure from just such a set of chance encounters), but from the burgeoning data about the influence of varying cultures on the minds and character of the people who have been raised within them, including their relationships to the dominant cultural figures and norms, and the influence of changes in the social and relational climate, including from overarching events like a pandemic.

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