key: cord-0715983-1eu3b6le
authors: Facchin, Federica
title: ‘FOR WEEKS NOW IT HAS BEEN EVENING’: A LETTER FROM NORTHERN ITALY
date: 2020-06-15
journal: Br J Psychother
DOI: 10.1111/bjp.12582
sha: 28861a5516ab412fbaa8bd268af519a6207b85a6
doc_id: 715983
cord_uid: 1eu3b6le

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rooftops, fireworks, and a variety of coloured 'everything will be alright' drawings made by our children.

It is now April 2020. In a short time, humanity offered its best and its worst. On the one hand, thousands of healthcare workers of all ages responded to the government appeal to create a task force to support health services in the worst-hit regions, including mine (Lombardy). The rhetoric of resilience and heroism spread on our social media, with heart-breaking videos showing the physical and emotional exhaustion of these men and women who will never forget the death they have been breathing through their masks for an endless amount of time. Most Italians patiently respected the rules and accepted an indefinite period of distancing from their family, friends, and lovers.

On the other hand, after the supermarket panic-buying, hundreds of people were charged for violating the containment measures. At the same time, a conspicuous group of postmodern inquisitors started the new Covid-19 'witch hunt' against runners, the most dangerous contemporary criminals. In the background, the silent tragedy of elderly peoplethe bearers of the memory of our pastwho have been dying in nursing homes, and the unspeakable anguish for our uncertain future. Will we still have a job? Will we meet our loved ones without fear of infecting them, or being infected? Will the idea of contact become automatically linked to that of contagion?

Science and politics, with their renewed cooperation after the Covid-19 outbreak, each day provide terrifying numbers and a variety of rules, but very few answers to our frightening questions. This new frontier of biopolitics aims at restoring power and control by reducing life to its biological dimension. Psychoanalysis, with its rigorous ethical principles, reminds us that human lived experience is much more complex than this, since it conceives life in the field of language. This practice deals with the singularity of the subject, which cannot be entirely captured by scientific laws. Psychoanalysis deals with the real of suffering as uniquely experienced by each individual, a real that cannot be quantified, but can certainly be approached with words.

Today is 25 April, our Liberation Day. Seventy-five years ago, the joint effort between Italian resistance fighters and the Anglo-American allies led to the fall of Mussolini and the end of the Nazi occupation in our country. Today, the word freedom has a slightly different sound, but the words of a 17-year-old partisan, Tina Anselmi, who later in life became the first female minister in Italy, may give us strength and hope. I found them in her book entitled Storia di una passione politica [History of a Political Passion] (Anselmi & Vinci, 2016) . I am pleased to translate them for you: 'In our normality, we found the strength, the courage, or perhaps the carefree unawareness to fight the horror. And to the death that was threatening us, hitting our families, our friends, our towns, we responded with our desire for life'.

Storia di una passione politica

She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, where she lectures on psychodynamics and on the clinical psychology of family relationships. She is also a lecturer at the Freudian Institute of Milan. Her clinical practice includes psychological counselling and support, and supervision. Her paper 'Psychoses without symptoms and stabilized psychoses: Lacanian suggestions for treating fuzzy contemporary clinical phenomena' was published in the

The author would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Ann Scott. The author also thanks Francesca Petrizzo and Emanuela Saita for their comments and suggestions.