Venuleo Claudia, Gelo Omar C G, Salvatore Sergio
Department of History, Society, and Human Studies, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy.
Faculty of Psychotherapy Science, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Austria.
Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2020 Apr;17(2):117-130. doi: 10.36131/CN20200218.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extraordinary challenge to clinicians, health care institutions and policymakers. The paper outlines a psychoanalytically grounded semiotic-cultural psychological interpretation of such a scenario. First, we underline how the actual emotional reaction (mainly of fear) of our society is a marker of how the mind functions in conditions of affective activation related to heightened uncertainty: it produces global, homogenizing and generalizing embodied interpretations of reality, at the cost of more fine-grained and differentiated analytical thought. Such a process, called affective semiosis, represents an adaptive response to the emergency in the short-term. Second, we argue that this adaptive value provided by affective semiosis will be reduced when we have to deal with the process of managing the transition to the post-crisis and the governance of the medium and longterm impact of the crisis. Third, we suggest that, in order to manage the pandemic crisis on a longer temporal frame, affective semiosis has to be integrated with less generalized and more domain-specific ways of interpreting reality. To this end, semiotic capital (i.e., culturally-mediated symbolic resources) should be promoted in order to enable people to interiorize the supra-individual and collective dimension of life. Accordingly, COVID-19 is proposed as a semiotic vaccine, a disruption in our everyday life routines which has the potential of opening the way to a semiotic reappropriation of the collective dimensions of our experience.
新冠疫情对临床医生、医疗机构和政策制定者构成了巨大挑战。本文概述了基于精神分析的符号文化心理学对这种情况的解读。首先，我们强调我们社会实际的情绪反应（主要是恐惧）是心灵在与高度不确定性相关的情感激活状态下如何运作的一个标志：它产生对现实的整体、同质化和普遍化的身体化解读，代价是更细致入微和有差异的分析性思维。这样一个过程，称为情感符号化，代表了短期内对紧急情况的适应性反应。其次，我们认为，当我们必须应对向危机后过渡的管理过程以及危机的中长期影响的治理时，情感符号化所提供的这种适应性价值将会降低。第三，我们建议，为了在更长的时间框架内管理疫情危机，情感符号化必须与不那么普遍化且更具领域特定性的现实解读方式相结合。为此，应该促进符号资本（即文化介导的象征资源），以使人们能够内化生活的超个体和集体维度。因此，新冠疫情被提议作为一种符号疫苗，是对我们日常生活惯例的一种干扰，有可能为对我们经验的集体维度进行符号重新占有开辟道路。
