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‘THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED’ IN COVID-19:
THE NEED FOR INTERVENTION AT
SOCIO-CULTURAL INSCAPE
PAULSON V. VELIYANNOOR
Forge Center for Claretian Renewal, Madrid, Spain
Faithful to the globalized spirit of the times, the COVID-19 pandemic has gone global, invading space and time universally, and leveling the developed, the developing, and the underdeveloped countries to a more or less undifferentiated, egalitarian status. The pandemic has been considered even to have led to the end of civilization as we know it (Garretón, 2020). The sudden disruption of life and the new normal have left individuals and communities psychologically distressed and wounded. Unsurprisingly, the trauma has also led to a resurgence of past wounds long thought to have been healed, not only at the individual level but at the level of the collective as well. My purpose in this paper is to explore, phenomenologically, theoretically, and interdisciplinarily, the return of the repressed at various levels, very specially at the societal-cultural levels, focusing especially on the Indian scenario. I begin from the therapeutic couch—sharing insights from a short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy with a client who reported re-emergence of past wounds during the pandemic. Using it as the totem, I then explore the re-emergence of past traumas at different levels, particularly analyzing in detail their symptomatic manifestations in the larger societal level in India, using the insights of the inter-disciplinary perspective of mimetic theory. I end the paper with some reflection on the role of psychologists and other behavioral scientists to engage in a more concerted and sustained intervention at the socio-cultural inscape to prevent worse cultural malaises.
“My past wounds are re-emerging”: A Brief Case Analysis
A middle-aged school teacher, Sarika (pseudonym), was referred to me during the pandemic, with the presenting problem of acute anxiety. Sarika lived in her brother’s house, away from the house she owned elsewhere, for reasons of her job and for the purpose of taking care of her mother. She sought out psychospiritual therapeutic help, with a statement that was revealing: “In the confinement, the past wounds, which were thought to have been healed, are re-emerging.” Sarika did not contract the virus; but due to the lockdown, she was confined to the inner spaces of the house, cut off from her job and social life. Such confinement triggered much anxiety, which in turn, re-opened the can of past wounds, thought to have been resolved and outgrown. We agreed to have weekly sessions over skype.
For the very first session, she chose to connect with me from her car. Almost three quarters of the time into the session, her mobile went dead. Not realizing what happened, I tried to re-connect several times, but did not succeed. I waited for her to reconnect, but nothing happened. Sometime later, I received her email, explaining that the battery of her mobile had run out. That she chose to connect with me from her car and not from the house, and that the battery failed to last the whole session were revealing to me, but I kept the insights as hypotheses until further verification. In the second session, Sarika chose to connect with me from within the house, but not from her room. While being at the session, the actual occupant of the room walked in, and she had to move out, finding another suitable location to continue her session with me. By the time we were into the fourth session, Sarika was suffering badly from severe back pain, bed-bound and unable to move around or do the daily chores. Further, she had an obsessive thought and image: that the columns of the floor would give in and the large washing machine on the floor above would break and flood her floor with water.
Sarika was a fairly successful woman with a good job and steady income. A well-grounded woman with fairly good ego strength and a healthy sense of spirituality, she had certain mastery over life, had a healthy social life, and engaged in much social service as well. However, the confinement triggered much anxiety, which in turn, re-opened some past wounds, especially in relation with her father. Her father was not expressive of his affection, but was very demanding; she had to earn his love and approval by doing her best and being useful. He had two families, and hence, Sarika missed her father when he was spending time with his second wife and children. There was the constant fear of losing him and the compulsion to win him back; the fear of being rejected by him. She had lived on the edges of anxiety of losing what she had, fighting hard to earn what had been in fact rightfully hers.
When I felt that she would be ready for some interpretation, I brought up some of events that unfolded within the sessions, with their possible meanings, for her reflection and verification. Living in a home that was not hers was like having a home, yet not owning. Wasn’t choosing to talk to me from her car and not from the house symbolic of a life that is unsettled and is still on the move? And, when she did talk to me from the house, choosing to do so from the room of another and not of her own: didn’t it communicate the same? Forgetting to keep the battery charged for the first session that led to the cut off of the session seemed symbolic of her fears of not having enough fuel to live her life to the full and the fear of losing the job and being cut off from life-supply due to the insecurities of the lockdown. The nearly paralyzing pain of her spinal column and the obsessive image of the collapse of the columns of the house and flooding of the room with the dirty water from the washing machine seemed to communicate the dread of flooding of anxiety and the loss of a secure life that had been built up so far, now by the stains of the past. Every one of these elements pointed to a sense of displacement, fear of losing one’s much fought for space in life, something that correlated with the dynamics of the pandemic lockdown.
These interpretations were not suggested at one go, but across several sessions, at opportune times. They struck a chord with Sarika, who responded at one moment with a solemn, pensive voice: “Paulson, it is not just about losing my space; it is all about not having space at all. I never had my space; I had been trying to win my space all my life!” This insight led to a re-assessment of her past fears that had lurked within, her present compulsions to be useful, productive, and win approval. She began reconnecting with her friends, gave up the compulsion to clean the house almost every day, enjoyed physical hugs from her daughter, lost fear of losing her job, enlisted for some courses online (interestingly, the first course she attended was on the Christian prayer “Our Father”, as if re-defining her relation with her own father, who is now “in heaven”). Her back pain gradually disappeared and so did the compulsive image of column-break and flooding. We mutually felt she was ready for termination of therapeutic accompaniment, and so we ended the sessions.
‘Return of the Repressed’ in the COVID-19
I have chosen to discuss the above case on account of two reasons: Firstly, it is a case of a therapeutic intervention from the pandemic times. Secondly, it points, revealingly, to the phenomenon of the “return of the repressed,” a concept made famous by Sigmund Freud (1900/1953; 1915/1957; 1939/1964), during the present pandemic times. No trouble comes alone; it often brings with it several companions, often opening up wounds that are thought to have been healed long ago. As the demon within the man who lived among the tombs answered when Jesus asked for its name— “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9)—it is a multitude of complexes that surface together, with a combined strength to waylay the person. More importantly, all these can happen not only at the individual level, but at the macro levels of family systems and societal-cultural systems, and therefore, call for careful, concerted, sustained, and anticipatory intervention. The consequences of the pandemic at personal and family system levels have been discussed at various fora. Here, I will only briefly recapitulate them more as a launching pad for the more urgent discussion on the return of the repressed at the socio-cultural level.
At Interdividual and Family Systems Levels
Given that the expression ‘self-made person’ is a lie and no individual is a solitary, unaffected, closed system, I prefer to use the term “interdividual” to the term “individual” in this context. Interdividual psychology was first introduced by René Girard and Jean-Michel Oughourlian (Girard, 1978/1987; Oughourlian, 2010; 2016) to explain the mimetic (imitative) dynamics that run amok in our lives. Everyone is a self that is created within the matrix of relationships, and hence, interdividuality refers to the true psychological reality that “is not situated within the individual but lies in the mysterious transparency of the relation between two persons” (Oughourlian, 2010, p. 34). As we are incurably relational, our traumas are also necessarily relational and interdividual.
That any new trauma may serve as a trigger for reactivation of past traumas and result in a chain reaction has been well documented (Herman, 1997). As one of the foundational assumptions of psychotherapy goes, the presenting problem is not the real problem. Hence, beneath the presenting problems associated with the pandemic may lie many unresolved interdividual issues that had been dormant until now. The pandemic has merely served as an opening for the pains of the past to re-emerge and make the scenario worse.
Prohibition to touch.
One of the psychologically most disruptive features of the current pandemic has been the proscription of touch and prescription of physical distancing. The sense of touch is thought to be the first sense to emerge and is one of the foremost forms of perceptual experience (Fulkerson, 2016). The 1971 classic Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin by Ashley Montagu (1986/1971) highlighted the role of skin and touch in human development, the deprivation of which could be even fatal. The mental life begins in the fetal stage (Mancia, 1981) and is so integrally linked to the sense of skin and touch that Anzieu calls the rudimentary sense of self as “skin-ego” (1989; 2005). If the daily metaphors we live by are windows to our psyche (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003), the pervasive use of skin- and touch-related metaphors in our daily conversations reveal the significance of touch. Sample this passage:
We speak of “rubbing” people the wrong way, and “stroking” them the right way; of “abrasive” and “prickly” personalities. We speak of “the personal touch,” … essentially his personality expressing itself by “getting in touch.” We say of someone that he has “a happy touch,” of another that he has “a magic touch,” and of another that he has “a human touch,” or that he has “a delicate touch” …. Some people are “hard” to deal with, others are “softies.” Some people have to be “handled” carefully (“with kid gloves''). We speak of someone who is quick to take offense or over sensitive as “touchy,” or “tetchy.” Some people are “thick-skinned,” others are “thin-skinned”; some get “under one's skin,” while others remain only “skin-deep.” Others are “out of touch,” or have “lost their grip.” Things are either “palpably” or “tangibly” so or not. (Montagu, 1986/1971, p. 10)
The sudden prohibition of touch is in many ways a drastic cut-off from our normal, necessary, life-giving, and taken-for-granted ways of living. Though Indians are generally reserved about hugging in public or within families, we still reach out and touch in manifold ways. The extremely high density of population has ensured that we live in touching proximity to others. We mill around touching and being touched by others whether it is in a bus, train station, mall, market place, or festival, an experience that can be overwhelmingly suffocating for a foreigner. Majority of us live with little sense of personal space. In this context, the prohibition to touch another person and the mandate to maintain physical distancing would be to speak a foreign language, totally unfamiliar to us. Whereas such new norms can be disturbing for any human being, it is all the more disruptive for our culture. This experience can undermine our sense of self, security, and connectedness.
Ambivalence of the virtual world.
There has always been an ambivalent attitude towards the virtual world, especially in India. However, in the pandemic times, the technological world suddenly has become the lifeline—to receive and pass on information, to connect socially while keeping physical distance, to see and communicate with members of the family stranded in various places, to participate in religious activities, etc. Educational institutions that would generally discourage use of mobile phones among students suddenly made it imperative that students resorted to attending virtual classes on social media. Parents who were concerned about their children glued to their mobiles and laptops now had to be cheerleaders for the use of the media. The use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) suddenly received a boost, and have been found to be useful for treatment, medical marketing, medical training and learning, and spreading disease awareness during the pandemic times (Singh, Javaid, Kataria, Tyagi, Haleem, & Suman, 2020). The AR, VR, and MR (Mixed Reality) have been the go-to solutions for the disruptions caused at work, schooling, travel, and other areas of social life (Dialani, 2020; Kumar, 2020; Riva & Wiederhold, 2020). However, besides their many benefits, they come with much psychological cost as well. The social isolation, increasing loneliness, being out of touch with reality, bullying, the deprivation of the innate human need to interact in person with fellow beings (Best, Manktelow, & Taylor, 2014; Lavoie, Main, King, & King, 2020). During the pandemic, we have had stories of student suicide due to the shame and anxiety caused by the lack of technological devises to log on to online classes.
Spectrum of disorders.
The loss of job, forced confinement, inability to communicate or provide for one’s family, the uncertainties of the future, fear of contagion and death—all these contribute to various psychiatric symptoms and a generic loss of sense of self and meaninglessness. Widespread negative psychological consequences have been reported within entire communities including students, casual laborers, healthcare professionals, and the general population (Bhat et al., 2020). It goes without saying that the mental health of children is significantly affected by the sustained and seemingly never-ending lockdown and the uncertainties about reopening of schools, examinations, meeting friends, outdoor life, etc. Studies have either predicted or confirmed the same, across the world (Grechyna, 2020, Liu, Bao, Huang, Shi, & Lu, 2020; Thakur, Kumar, & Sharma, 2020).
Traumatized familial dynamics.
The routine organization within the family of various roles and functions generally helps maintain certain balance, harmony, and status quo, where interpersonal tensions and relational disappointments are camouflaged and held in a delicate balance. Work can serve as a much-needed distraction and means for healthy spacing between members. However, under the attack of the pandemic and the resultant lockdown, this delicate balance is offset which can trigger past wounds. Whereas there is no denying that lockdown can bring the usually busy members together in greater intimacy and communication, sometimes it can also work in the reverse: they may find the 24x7 presence of everyone together with nothing much to do but a bit too intense. If the emotional capital and relational bond have been weak among the members, it can intensify and speed up a break up. China witnessed a significant spike in divorce rates following the pandemic (Prasso, 2020). There was a 42% spurt in divorce inquiries in England since the pandemic began (Everett, 2020 June 3). A rise in child sexual abuse has been reported in the US (Kamenetz, 2020). The National Commission for Women (NCW) reported an increase in domestic violence in India (Roy, 2020). India faces its own unique problems within the family systems given the number of families living below the poverty line with no sufficient space or sanitation facilities; with huge numbers of migrants returning home unexpectedly and with no money in hand. Ironically, the couples may be deprived of space for sharing intimacy even when they are in the presence of each other more than ever; and the children, forced to be indoors with little space to vent their energies would also find the home atmosphere challenging. All these can lead to old ghosts reemerging to upset familial relations.
Return of the Repressed at the Socio-Cultural Level
This brings us to the heart of the matter: What are the repressed legions that may return to surface at the socio-cultural level in our Indian society in pandemic times such as now, and that compel our attention? I will begin with a few symptoms, which have been reported across mass media:
● Ostracization and even physical attack of medical personnel for fear of contamination.
● Refusal to bury bodies of those who died, or are thought to have died, of corona virus. Refusal to even claim such bodies by the families.
● Opposition to the return of the non-resident Indians; hostile ostracization of those who returned.
● The eagerness to disclaim the migrants in their states of work, and the refusal to accommodate them on their return to their residences.
● Social media posts justifying and normalizing the old and banned practices of untouchability as wise and prudent practices of social distancing.
● The Tablighi Jamaat event and the consequent targeted victimization of a community as the cause of the spread of the virus.
● The persistent back-and-forth attempts to pin the blame on specific groups or agencies, between various governments.
● Demonization or idolization of specific political leaders in the pandemic times.
Mimetic crisis and sacrificial resolution.
One might say that these are not singularly peculiar to India, and some of these symptoms are evident in other countries as well, during the pandemic crisis. That is precisely the point: What we see unfolding before our eyes is a universal human dynamic. However, they unfold in a more-or-less manner and with unique configuration in a given socio-cultural context, given the presence or absence of checks and balances. We will only be focusing on the Indian cultural context here. However, given the universality of the phenomenon and its dangers, it is necessary to understand the dynamics unfolding across the above symptoms that we have been witnessing in India. I do so hitchhiking on the insights of mimetic theory, first enunciated by René Girard (1972/1977, 1978/1987, 1982/1989, 2011; Girard, Antonello, & Rocha, 2007), and which has now been acknowledged to have wide-ranging explanatory and application potential across disciplines (Alison & Palaver, 2017; O’ Shea, 2010; Palaver, 2013). Given the limited scope of this paper, I do not attempt to present the theory in detail, but only apply some of its insights.
According to the insights of mimetic theory, when a society is faced with a sudden crisis, its spontaneous, unconscious instinct is to resolve the crisis through a sacrificial, victimary mechanism. In fact, cultural anthropologists and social scientists have long argued that sacrifice is foundational to human culture (Hubert & Mauss, 1898/1964); what Girard offers is to explore how and why sacrifice becomes foundational. According to Girard, when a society en masse faces a crisis that threatens to destabilize and destroy it, all the carefully built up social differentiation, stratification, and structuring collapses, leading to a complete undifferentiation that leads to massive violence which, if not checked, would destroy the society. Given the collective instinct for survival, there emerges then a spontaneous, unconscious search for a victim who ‘caused’ the crisis. The search often culminates in the identification of an individual or a group who are not fully an insider or an outsider, and hence, is sacrificable. Once a victim is identified as the cause of the crisis, there is a spontaneous reorganization of the society into ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ them being the victim so identified. A collective projection results, with all the ills projected on to the victim, making him or her the mother of all evils, dehumanizing and depersonalizing the victim. The entire collective truly believes in the guilt of the victim—truly believes, for it is an unconscious mechanism—and they discharge cathartically all their terrorizing anxieties and pulsating violence on to the victim by sacrificing him or her—be it by stoning to death, lynching, crucifying, burning at the stake; or by far more ‘civilized’ forms as getting the state to ostracize or eliminate them. With the violence unleashed on the victim, the collective acquits itself of its contribution to the crisis, peace results, order can be re-established, and life can go on smoothly once again.
This might look far-fetched. However, an honest introspection will reveal that we order and re-order our lives in this sacrificial manner. When a crisis hits a family, our tendency is to identify one member as the cause for it, ostracize him or her from the family, cut off all relationships with him or her, or sometimes even to the point of murdering them, and “peace and honor” return to the family. When the economy crumbles, whom else to victimize other than the head of the state? Or, when a country is in total disorder, why not declare a war against an outside enemy or at least use a territorial infringement to help the citizens forget the crisis and unite as one? From a seemingly harmless gossip (verbal sacrifice) to international wars, multiple and subtle are the incarnations of sacrificial dynamics in our personal and corporate lives. It is hard to recognize one’s own contribution to the disorder and withdraw the projections, which calls for epistemic and ontological humility.
One may argue thus: “But, some of these people: they are really guilty.” Except in some cases, such as the extraordinarily psychologically meaningful (but ethically disastrous) ritualized sacrificial systems practiced in ancient Africa (e.g., the exchange of an innocent man to be sacrificed for a murder committed, as described by the Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart, 1958/1994), no victim may be totally guilt-free. However, it is hardly the truth that he or she alone is the total and exclusive cause for the crisis faced by the society. One of the foundational characters for classical psychology and psychotherapeutic systems is the Greek tragic hero, Oedipus. We have taken the story so much for granted that we hardly ask ourselves: was he really and solely guilty for the crisis that gripped the kingdom of Thebes? The entire story pivots on a singular and persistent accusation by Tiresias, a blind prophet (how fitting that he was blind—a perfect symbol for the blind, unconscious dynamics of the collective accusatory, scapegoating syndrome!). Sophocles gives no foolproof evidence, and we will never know; but Oedipus ends up becoming the scapegoat for the healing of Thebes, and continues to be so in our psychological (mis)adventures (Anspach, 2020).
There is every possibility that the accused victim may be innocent, or partly guilty, or no guiltier than the rest. Often it is their ‘outlier’ status that gravitates the collective to victimize them. Girard and fellow researchers point out that it is often people on the margins of the society, by virtue of their handicap, social status, religion, age, etc. who end up being victims. None of this is reason enough to merit the kind of destiny or treatment that he or she receives. It is when the collective is capable of realizing this fact, withdrawing the impulsive and violent collective projections from the victim, and owning up the collective responsibility for the crisis, that we graduate as civilized, cultured human beings.
Critical vulnerability of the Indian context.
With these insights, let us turn to the current Indian context. Like any culture, we have had a mixed cultural baggage—of many achievements and victories a well as tragedies and traumas. Some of the deep-rooted cultural traumas that we have lived through and that remain in our collective (un)conscious are the caste system and its multifaceted and gruesome consequences, linguistic divisions, interreligious tensions, discrimination against women, many superstitions, sati, feudal wars and conquests, colonial past and its bruises, etc. Though we have theoretically risen above these malaises, practically, some of these traumas continue to exist, in subtle and gross forms, in many corners of India. For nearly a decade, India has been going through a crisis simmering at the surface and precipitated by political, economic, religious, and other extremist factors. The growing fundamentalist and intolerant tendencies in religious spheres, obliteration of historical facts and rewriting of history that suits hidden agendas of groups with vested interests, compromise of constitutional mechanisms, failure of checks and balances, suspicion of critical thinking, etc., have created an atmosphere of fear, mistrust, anger, frustration, and simmering collapse of societal systems. Such an atmosphere is the recipe for a mimetic crisis and its undifferentiation that leads to easy scapegoating violence. We have seen lynching in the name of religion and lifestyles. We have also seen the compromise of judicial systems that are too eager to hang anyone when the public turns blood-thirsty. Demonizing any accused even before the investigation begins, and projecting all societal evils into them make them easy targets for extrajudicial murders and help the society remain blissfully blind to its own share of the blame.
It is in such context that the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged with its extreme provocation of death-anxiety, fears of contamination, and the prohibition of touch and proximate interactions and prescription of physical distancing. Some of these dynamics play directly into the hands of the kind of traumas the Indian collective has passed through in the past. Hence, it is least surprising that the contamination of virus and the prohibition of touch can easily and retrospectively validate the practices of untouchability of the past, reincarnating it in a modern scientific garb of hygiene, and a cultural chest-thumping. It is revealing to note that the use of the medical term cordon sanitaire in the pandemic times to refer to medical quarantine has already been commented upon by Ambedkar in the context of untouchability! Observing that every village had a ghetto and the untouchables were confined to the ghetto, Ambedkar (1948/2018) shreds to pieces the argument that the isolation of the untouchables was for temporary hygienic purposes:
It is not a case of social separation, a mere stoppage of social intercourse for a temporary period. It is a case of territorial segregation and of a cordon sanitaire putting the impure people inside a barbed wire into a sort of a cage. (pp. 21-22)
Given the ease with which misinformation can be disseminated today thanks to the proliferation of social media, and given the proclivity of the masses towards rumors in times of crisis, it becomes easier to convince people of the truth of the new claims and effect a return to such practices of the past, which have been lurking in the collective unconscious as repressed history.
Given the sensitive multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual fabric of Indian society, the ‘insider-outsider’ differentiation can suddenly take shape. It is here the migrant laborers who have been until now an integral part of one’s society for its many needs can turn out to be unwelcome intruders, and be denounced both by the states of their origin and work. We have seen the haste with which states denounced them and how they had to walk thousands of miles to reach back home, with hardly anyone to provide for them. The same dynamics apply for the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), who have been contributing significantly to the economic wellbeing of the country, suddenly turning out to be unwelcome and targets of hostility.
A correlated sign of mimetic crisis and its sacrificial tendencies is to uncritically submit oneself to a leader, a collective subordination of the will to one person, without critical thinking, questioning, and airing differences of opinion. One of the key reasons Nazi brutality occurred was the uncritical submission of the collective will to one person. One of the legal maxims from Jewish Talmud, which has often confounded modern jurisprudence, yet carries great wisdom can be paraphrased thus: If everyone unanimously finds someone guilty, release him or her, for he or she must be innocent. The wisdom of this maxim is that unanimity can be often suspect, for no one (dares to) think differently, a failure that can obliterate the truth (Glatt, 2013). Thus, the need to encourage diverse voices and critical thinking is sine qua non for avoiding collective tragedies. The intolerance to critical thinking and d