Getting Lost: Reflections on Psychopolitical Isolation and Withdrawal

Table of Contents:
About the editors and contributors  Introduction  Matthew H. Bowker and Amy Buzby Time may change us: The strange temporalities, novel paradoxes, and democratic imaginaries of a pandemic Jill Gentile Empty defiance: Antisociality and the loss of hope in the Covidian age  Amy Buzby From anomia to stasis: Psychic retreat, gangs, and perversion  Matthew H. Bowker Anxiety, psychic regression, and the demise of the civic self Michael J. Thompson The American experience of democracy deserts during the pandemic Jack Fong Getting lost without a self to lose: Winnicott and psychic absence in the post-Covidian era  Nathan Gerard Social-theoretical distancing: Liberatory ambitions in Covidian times Elliott Schwebach Ostracism in the era of Covid-19: Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup perspectives  Theofilos Gkinopoulos and Evangelia Galanaki Lives in Covid: A relational history of a pandemic  Dan Livney Index

About the Author :
Matthew H. Bowker, Ph.D., is clinical assistant professor in the Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Program at SUNY, University at Buffalo. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Maryland, College Park, he is the author of more than fifteen books and several dozen scholarly essays. He coedits Routledge’s book series, Psychoanalytic Political Theory and is editor (N. America) for the Journal of Psycho-Social Studies (USA). Bowker’s primary research interests are critical psychopolitical theory, literary criticism, and political philosophy. His latest books are The Angels Won’t Help You (Punctum Books), The Destroyed World and the Guilty Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Culture and Politics (with D. Levine, Phoenix), and Oblation: Essays, Parables, and Paradoxes (Punctum Books). Amy Buzby has a Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University—New Brunswick, and is an associate professor of political science at Arkansas State University. Her publications include Subterranean Politics and Freud’s Legacy and D. W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject (with Dr. Matthew Bowker). She is currently working on a monograph about D. W. Winnicott and the political implications of his praxis.

Review :
'A timely, deeply thoughtful collection of psychoanalytically framed accounts of the meaning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of democracy’s inability to effectively manage it for so many citizens. These well-organized analytic reflections are worth reading over and over again. Thanks to the editors Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby for exhibiting the under-appreciated explanatory compatibility of psychoanalytic theory and democratic theory for coping with catastrophic events.' 'Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby assemble a cast of sharp analysts to sift illuminatingly through the wreckage wrought as much by responses to Covid-19 as by the malady itself ... Getting Lost is a valuable kickstart to post-mortems on the political consequences of the psychological dimension of the crisis.’ 'The paradoxical nature of the Covid pandemic – creating longing for connection while thwarting it, unleashing the communal terror of an illness that had to be borne alone if we were all to survive – ripples through and shapes the world we live in now. This intriguing book seeks to make sense of its interpsychic, relational, and societal impacts. At a time of “world wrenching stress in public life” when our “individual and shared capacity for holding is collapsing,” these writers offer us a necessary form of containment, an opportunity to grieve for the elusive return to normal, and a reimagining of the challenges of public and private life in the context of that grief.'