Publication Announcement by Michael Korson (USA)

(2021) Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 16(3), 292-295.

In this meditative essay written at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the author looks at the staggering change in which the world is turned upside down. This change is conveyed by the presence of antinomies — disparate and seemingly incompatible truths that exist simultaneously – that are created and exposed. It is a time when to show love means to remain physically distant from loved ones. And perhaps the most disturbing of antinomies: we are “in it together” and we are not. Clinically, it is a time of “shared trauma,” as both analyst and patient are susceptible to the same ominous threat. And as the coronavirus spreads, the other pandemic of systemic racism becomes more revealed. The author considers privilege outside and inside the clinical setting. During this upended time, so full of paradox, he suggests that psychoanalysis, with its spaciousness and provisions for uncertainty and indeterminacy, provides a framework in which to, if not fix this strangeness, live in it and speak of it together.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24720038.2021.1913169

Michael Korson, MFT
San Francisco, California, USA
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