The body as an essay for love and death: narcissism and helplessness in pandemic times

Abstract

This paper approaches the Freudian concepts of narcissism and psychoanalysis (Hilflosigkeit). The objective is to reflect on how social isolation and the 2020 pandemic affect our relationship with the body, as well as experiences of loss and anguish related to the risk of illness and death. It is argued that avoiding encounters with helplessness promotes subjectivity modalities throughout subjection and melancholic fixation, as well as attitudes of denial related to the experience of reality. The excessive demand for love and support reduces suffering to the desire for narcissistic reassurance, which limits the search for transformation over the experience of helplessness and the very act of sufferingitself. Based on theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic contribution, we discuss ways of social and subjective reaction in the socio-political configuration of the current pandemic context. We conclude that there is a selfishness to be abandoned, under the penalty of us becoming sicker. This seems to be the case of fixation to closed and total systems.