Trauma of the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Latency Child

• Published in: Psychoanalytic psychology 2023-07, Vol.40 (3), p.182-189
• Main Author: Abrams, David M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: COVID-19; Dreaming; Human; Male; Online Therapy; Pandemics; Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; Psychoanalysis; Trauma
• ISSN: 0736-9735; 1939-1331
• DOI: 10.1037/pap0000453

Article presents the online analytic treatment of Alfred, a 6½-year-old African American boy in whom the outbreak and first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a devastating posttraumatic stress disorder and chronic ongoing cumulative trauma. In contrast to concrete attacking life-threatening external objects in the case of collapsing buildings, car accidents, or rape, COVID-19 was represented by this sensitive and imaginative child as a gradually more amorphous and invisible monster that quarantined his mother away from him for 2 months, killed his great uncle, and eventually infected him with frightening asthmatic breathing. The mandated lockdown of the in-person closing of his school, after school activities, church, and neighborhood playground engendered a closed-in prison-like experience within his home, which stimulated animal phobia, agoraphobia, separation anxiety, and occasional claustrophobia. He seemed first to internally experience the COVID-19 pandemic displaced onto a fox, large dogs, and his father as an outer space alien dressed in the body suit, gloves, mask, and face shield required in his health worker military job. Then these displacements gradually changed to the more inconsistently visible bed bugs, vampires, and shape shifting monsters in his fantasies, stories, and dreams. COVID-19 turned Alfred's world from supportive childhood social relations to long periods of lonely isolation in front of his television and computer, where he was further traumatized by watching the entire video of the murder of George Floyd and the powerful metaphor of the COVID-19 pandemic in Carpenter's (1982) horror film "The Thing."