Getting Lost

Matthew H. Bowker, Ph.D., is clinical assistant professor in the Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Program at SUNY, University at Buffalo. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Maryland, College Park, he is the author of more than fifteen books and several dozen scholarly essays. He coedits Routledge’s book series, Psychoanalytic Political Theory and is editor (N. America) for the Journal of Psycho-Social Studies (USA). Bowker’s primary research interests are critical psychopolitical theory, literary criticism, and political philosophy. His latest books are The Angels Won’t Help You (Punctum Books), The Destroyed World and the Guilty Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Culture and Politics (with D. Levine, Phoenix), and Oblation: Essays, Parables, and Paradoxes (Punctum Books).Amy Buzby has a Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University—New Brunswick, and is an associate professor of political science at Arkansas State University. Her publications include Subterranean Politics and Freud’s Legacy and D. W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject (with Dr. Matthew Bowker). She is currently working on a monograph about D. W. Winnicott and the political implications of his praxis.

• About the editors and contributors Introduction Matthew H. Bowker and Amy BuzbyTime may change us: The strange temporalities, novel paradoxes, and democratic imaginaries of a pandemicJill GentileEmpty defiance: Antisociality and the loss of hope in the Covidian age Amy BuzbyFrom anomia to stasis: Psychic retreat, gangs, and perversion Matthew H. BowkerAnxiety, psychic regression, and the demise of the civic selfMichael J. ThompsonThe American experience of democracy deserts during the pandemicJack FongGetting lost without a self to lose: Winnicott and psychic absence in the post-Covidian era Nathan GerardSocial-theoretical distancing: Liberatory ambitions in Covidian timesElliott SchwebachOstracism in the era of Covid-19: Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup perspectives Theofilos Gkinopoulos and Evangelia GalanakiLives in Covid: A relational history of a pandemic Dan LivneyIndex

'A timely, deeply thoughtful collection of psychoanalytically framed accounts of the meaning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of democracy’s inability to effectively manage it for so many citizens. These well-organized analytic reflections are worth reading over and over again. Thanks to the editors Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby for exhibiting the under-appreciated explanatory compatibility of psychoanalytic theory and democratic theory for coping with catastrophic events.'