Surviving the virus.

Abstract

The author, a psychology professor, details his personal experience in becoming infected with COVID-19 in Bergamo, the epicenter of the pandemic in Italy. The essay reads like a diary, where thoughts and affects are overlapping. The text shows variations in the style of writing, ranging from the conceptual to the literary, and stream of consciousness.

Commentary on notes from a pandemic: A year of COVID-19.

“…Rather, as we did with Civatarese, we will especially focus on the two dreams that he relates to us. Barbetta (2021) begins his odyssey by saying he felt like "a fish out of water" (p. 136). His "mannish" voice had turned into "a childish treble" (p. 136) since it was so difficult for him to breathe.…”

“…Antonino (Nino) Ferro (2021) provides for us a dream-like experience of his swimming through the pandemic. The third author, Pietro Barbetta (2021), a prominent psychoanalyst and family therapist from Milan, reveals the nightmare of the pandemic in diary entries written while he nearly died in the hospital after becoming infected with COVID-19.…”

“…Pietro Barbetta (2021) allows us to see the inverse of the anxieties that Citavarese presents. Citavarese tells us about anxieties around being infected by the virus and the hysteria to paranoia involved in thinking about being infected and who might be a spreader of the virus.…”

“…What I take out is a white phone, it is not mine, it belongs to a woman. … (Barbetta, 2021, p. 138) The day before, for the first time, he had heard his son talking about his discharge. In the dream he is home but he can’t quite believe he is home and brings a bit of the hospital with him with a series of beds.…”

“…If the dreamer can’t tolerate the issue, the dreamer is either awakened or the dream is buried (forgotten). Barbetta’s (2021) next night dreams he thinks are about death but they are “lost, somewhere” (p. 138). The Nazis are brought back to his consciousness and at the same time he wonders, “Why Joyce was so interested in this Jew” (p. 138), Bloom in Ulysses .…”