Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year

'Donald Moss returns with a new book to give us evidence of his extraordinary ability to listen and care for mental suffering. Rivers of words have been written on the effects of COVID-19 on clinical work. We then need to distance ourselves from all this noise. Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year offers us this possibility. Not theories, concepts, abstractions; instead, the event, every time new and daily, lived many times but always amazing: the spoken word and the experience of a special space in which to welcome it. With delicacy, discretion and a fine sense of humor, Donald Moss brilliantly captures the essence of psychoanalysis in a dimension that is not purely cognitive, but also, and perhaps primarily, poetic-aesthetic, sensory and bodily.'

Giuseppe Civitarese is author of Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis (2017)

'The reality of COVID-19 is present here not in the reported statements but in the shape they make on the page, and the time (the timing) those shapes suggest. Many of the days' notations, looked at together, seem like negative sonnets, or lines on their way toward the full fourteen and no quite getting there. They are sonnets of negation, but so are most sonnets. How rare it is, whatever the surrounding calm of supporting belief, for verse to have happiness happen on the page or in the prosody—or even, if happiness is too much (the wrong thing) to ask for, then simply the feeling of things taking a turn for the better. Moments like these occur in the book, but they are rare. I think that is because they are rare in poetry in general.'

Timothy J. Clarkis Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013) and Heaven on Earth: Patining and the Life to Come (2018)