Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year

Donald Moss has been a psychoanalyst in New York for 40 years and was most recently the recipient of the Haskell Norman Prize for excellence in psychoanalysis (2020). He is part of the College Executive of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, a member of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalytic Association, and a founding member of the Green Gang.

• Preface Foreword by T.J. Clark Day 1. Did you forget you could kill yourself? Day 2. I picture their kiss and everything else. Day 3. You’re insane. Day 4. I’ll be better when the sun comes in. Day 5. Wash your hands; say please and thank you. Day 6. Who do you think you are? Day 7. "I want" is not really me wanting. Day 8. Where is your compassion? Day 9. This house is in foreclosure. Day 10. Quarantine is a gift. Day 11. I don’t have any real criminal impulse. Day 12. I feel like I’m in danger. Day 13. I want a working interior. Day 14. You exhaled as though in pain. Day 15. I need to be everything. Day 16. I can’t interpret the world. Day 17. This is not a way to be. Day 18. I felt mutilated when my father died. Day 19. It all stopped when I was 20. Day 20. You just pop in and out as you like. Day 21. This call is my only point of continuity. Day 22. You would cringe, if you knew I’d said that. Day 23. I have to remain in this humble state. Day 24. She married a very wealthy man. Day 25. They just don’t stand a chance. Day 26. And of course I think of you. Day 27. She’ll only say I’m a monster. Day 28. It’s real and it’s not my doing. Day 29. I have all my materials here. Day 30. That’s a much better way of putting it. Day 31. I want the painless natural outcome. Day 32. That’s not what you’re supposed to do. Day 33. I was something that happened to them. Day 34. You see me as shallow. Day 35. I realize I don’t have finite time. Day 36. She’s probably envious of me. Day 37. The task is to be charming. Day 38. Have you experienced what I just described? Day 39. Have you noticed a newly emerging psychology? Day 40 First I’m in, then I’m out. Day 41. I can’t engage with all of this. Day 60. If I go outside, I’ll die alone. Day 61. There is no place for me on the planet. Day 62. I am cursed. Day 63. No matter where I go, I’m still there. Day 64. I want someone to think for me. Day 65. You’re tactful because I’m so fragile. Day 66. I have to stop needing affirmation. Day 70. Please don’t abuse me. Day 71. There’s no evading scorn. Day 72. I’m not really an actor-outer. Day 73. If someone would only read me my rights. Day 74. A huge amount of time goes into seducing women. Day 75. Maybe there was a little bit of terror. Day 76. It’s bizarre that I live without sex. Day 77. Do I look like someone with a castration complex? Day 78. My advisors are against it. Day 79. You just really have to figure out what I want. Day 80. Why is it so dark here and so light there? Day 81. I have nothing of value to say. Day 82. Irreversibility terrifies me. Day 83. Who is this entitled little prick? Day 84. It’s glamor and fairy dust I’m after. Day 85. I’m not content but I do accept it. Day 86. I need strength for when you’re not here. Day 87. I don’t trust my own words; only yours. Day 88. You could always say it’s me who’s failing. Day 89. Maybe I should spend all my time in Nature. Day 90. I can’t tell if I was an idiot or a hero. Day 91. It would be easier if my mother were a crackhead. Day 92. I feel dead, no more gloss or glitter. Day 93. I’m moved by you but then what? Day 94. Meaning vanishes when I think you’re not listening. Day 95. I keep allowing myself to be stressed. Day 96. I can’t stand the word "love". Day 97. Power always corrupts me. Day 98. "I don’t know" means I don’t commit. Day 99. "Himself" is the only real person. Day 100. A greater thinker would be better at this than we are. Day 101. Are you there or are you doing something else? Day 102. It seems like weeks since we spoke Day 103. I envy how intensely she lives. Day 104. That makes me feel this is a purely financial transaction. Day 105. Can breath work supplement what we do? Day 106. Some people do take care of others. Day 107. This is a reasonably excellent outcome. Day 108. 10,000 photos—I must have had an interesting life. Day 109. Whatever I say can’t be taken back. Day 110. I can’t even imagine a dialogue, you there and me here. Day 111. Being in the flow is not sustainable, is it? Day 112. Being so angry makes me feel clear-headed. Day 113. Danger comes the moment my life is mine. Day 114. I reach but I can’t find myself. Day 115 We’re all going to die; it’s way too dangerous. Day 116 I’m just keeping this conversation going until the time comes. Day 117 I had a companion inside of me and then it was gone. Day 118. I’m not allowed to focus on love until I’ve figured out money. Day 119. I am pretty divided myself. Day 120. I regret whatever I do. Day 121. Your saying resentment really got to me. Day 122. What I want is for someone to know me. Day 123. I may be making up everything I say about myself. Day 124. Sobbing like that was like vomiting. Day 125. Who would ever want to have a child with me? Day 126. I couldn’t really understand your writing. Day 127. I don’t know how to talk with you when my mind is just drifting. Day 128. What do you mean when you say "cloudy"? Day 129. I was feeling so recharged but woke up in enormous pain. Day 130. The man couldn’t speak after what he had seen. Day 131. She’s not stupid; she just has stupid ideas. Day 132. I have been conditioned to hold onto this stuff. Day 133. She offered me everything she had-- $57. Day 134. Nobody here drives pickup trucks. Day 135. I want to find an esoteric interpretation for this. Day 136. I’m forgetting these things I wouldn’t normally forget. Day 137. It was just totalizing fear. Day 138. I really don’t like this. Day 139. We’re in a circle and I won’t keep doing it. Day 140. I feel cared for in restaurants. Day 141. I wish I could access a self-portrait for you. Day 142. My gyroscope has me always pointed toward her. Day 143. I feel like this whole thing it not going to end well. Day 144. Someone else would have fought back Day 145. Is it possible to not be dehumanized? Day 146. I’m letting you down. Day 147. I need to set myself in motion. Day 148. You have to stay three steps ahead, not just one. Day 149. I want a decision without consequences. Day 150. I reduce myself to the role of the extra. Day 151. There’s no audience to remind me that I’m separate. Day 152. There’s only space for one: hopeful or hopeless. Day 153. No point in thinking about deeply ingrained habits. Day 154. Am I cool, am I a loser, am I un-necessary? Day 155. I’m not sure how speaking with you will matter. Day 156. I met some girls so I’m feeling much better. Day 157. I just want to be great at something. Day 158. There should be urgency but there isn’t. Day 159. With women, I’m not part of the bond between them. Day 160. I’m not a baby—I can take it. Day 161. I fill my notebook with hexagonal symmetries. Day 162. It was a funny day yesterday—we got married. Day 163. I was afraid that would make you angry. Day 164. I want to cry at the complexity of it. Day 165. They can only get help over the phone. Day 166. I sit in her window and look at the snow. Day 167. My hand still hurts from banging the walls. Day 168. Sixteen months is kind of a long time. Day 169. I’m lying and cheating wherever I go. Day 170. What is there that’s hard to talk about? Day 171. I want to ask you how you are, where you’re from. Day 172. People will be jealous if I take pleasure in my work. Day 173. Can you hear the waves in the background? Day 174. What do you think that is? Day 175. Don’t tell me what I already know. Day 176. I want to create a beautiful interior space. Day 177. I didn’t like her but she did have very beautiful hair. Day 178. No need for her to lie to me anymore. Day 179. I am afraid to come out of the shadows. Day 180. I want to squash and conquer her independence. Day 181. None of the people I’m with is magical. Day 182. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true. Day 183. With the men, there are no decision to make. Day 184. I’m the one who’s having fun. Day 185. She was bat-shit crazy. Day 186. I once allowed my father to see me naked. Day 187. I’m only being defensive when I am cold and distant. Day 188. Why am I so afraid to be alone? Day 189. I’m always looking to relax my brain.

'Donald Moss returns with a new book to give us evidence of his extraordinary ability to listen and care for mental suffering. Rivers of words have been written on the effects of COVID-19 on clinical work. We then need to distance ourselves from all this noise. Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year offers us this possibility. Not theories, concepts, abstractions; instead, the event, every time new and daily, lived many times but always amazing: the spoken word and the experience of a special space in which to welcome it. With delicacy, discretion and a fine sense of humor, Donald Moss brilliantly captures the essence of psychoanalysis in a dimension that is not purely cognitive, but also, and perhaps primarily, poetic-aesthetic, sensory and bodily.'Giuseppe Civitarese is author of Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis (2017)'The reality of COVID-19 is present here not in the reported statements but in the shape they make on the page, and the time (the timing) those shapes suggest. Many of the days' notations, looked at together, seem like negative sonnets, or lines on their way toward the full fourteen and no quite getting there. They are sonnets of negation, but so are most sonnets. How rare it is, whatever the surrounding calm of supporting belief, for verse to have happiness happen on the page or in the prosody—or even, if happiness is too much (the wrong thing) to ask for, then simply the feeling of things taking a turn for the better. Moments like these occur in the book, but they are rare. I think that is because they are rare in poetry in general.'Timothy J. Clark is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013) and Heaven on Earth: Patining and the Life to Come (2018)