Editorial

Abstract

I am preparing this editorial one year into the pandemic in the UK where we anticipate an ending of another lockdown but not the ending of the pandemic. It seems the virus will not be eliminated, we shall need to continue to live with more uncertainty and risk. The Main papers in this issue and the first paper in Open Space offer important contributions about living with the pandemic. These papers testify to the depth of thinking and creativity that lockdowns have inspired, but also remind us of worries about the future: whether we shall be able to mourn and make reparation especially in relation to the dreadful damage we have inflicted on our planet, and the deadly inequalities in our society about which we have been starkly reminded over this last year. The opening paper Being Brown: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Internalised Colonisation by Rhea Gandhi is a powerful exploration of the hatred embodied and enacted in the colonial exploitation of ‘racism’. This is a courageously personal study, marvellously reflective about inner and outer worlds and their interaction, the intersection of racism with gender, and these influences on the process of writing this paper.Gandhi draws on a wide variety of psychoanalytic and other sources to amplify the challenges she presents if we are to help address the inequalities that have ensued from what we project and enact in racism and misogyny.This is a substantial main paper like the other two, and like them will well repay careful study. An interview with Darian Leader on the Pandemic is the edited transcript by Nick Barwick of his interview with Leader for this journal in association with the Birkbeck Counselling Association’s autumn conference last November. It proved a remarkable interview for the valuable exploration and insight by Leader and Barwick. Many aspects, including clinical experiences during the last year, past pandemics, present uncertainties, and apprehensions about future ‘amnesia’, were discussed with a view to considering how to achieve a better future. Singing Potatoes: Bion’s Concept of O and the Frustrations of Not Knowing, by Jennie Hogan is a searching study of this most puzzling Bion concept which he said trying to describe was like ‘singing potatoes’. Hogan makes no apologies for the obscurity of Bion’s writings but offers instead her scholarship and passion in seeking to explain her understanding of it, including the importance of ‘resisting understanding’. She draws on a wide range of relevant material including a case example from her own clinical work to illustrate ‘the creative and potentially transformative elements at play’. Psychodynamic Practice, 2021 Vol. 27, No. 2, 125–126, https://doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2021.1914912