Das Coronavirus: Überlegungen zu einem bedrohlichen Fremdkörper

The virus, currently the coronavirus, can be read psychoanalytically as a metaphor for strangeness, familiarity and uncanniness and reminds the subject of the limitations of what is physically controllable. The coronavirus and thus coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) challenges psychoanalysis to deal with the unconscious, repressed dynamics of the virus and, above all with the virus metaphor. The virus is a complex conceptual structure, the effects of which go far beyond the biological pathogen. Epidemic diseases have always been an image of social disorder and are also used as an explanation for their appearance: Oedipus and the plague over Thebes is a prominent historical example and refers to a transgenerational familial (sexual) disorder. The virus is understood as an invading element into one’s own unknown cell, understood as the individual body and the collective body; it is the threatening stranger par excellence and at the same time synonymous with the highest flexibility. This specific penetration into one’s own body evokes an archaic fear with the early defence mechanisms of the split between denial, introjection and projection but also immunity. When we speak of a virus today we always mean one thing above all: an invader that takes possession of an organism, a body, in order to enter into a symbiotic relationship with the host. An analogy to the occupation of the ego with super-ego or the id. We are currently witnessing how these effects of the coronavirus affect the subject psychologically: denial, division, paranoid conspiracy theories, voluntary schizoid isolation and the face mask debate.