Open Access
Fear, affective semiosis, and management of the pandemic crisis: Covid-19 as semiotic vaccine?
Claudia Venuleo,Omar Carlo Gioacchino Gelo,Sergio Salvatore +2 more
- Vol. 2, Iss: 17, pp 117-130
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this article, a psychoanalytically grounded semiotic-cultural psychological interpretation of the COVID-19 pandemic is presented, where the actual emotional reaction (mainly of fear) of our society is a marker of how the mind functions in conditions of affective activation related to heightened uncertainty, at the cost of more fine-grained and differentiated analytical thought.Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extraordinary challenge to clinicians, health care institutions and policymakers. The paper outlines a psychoanalytically grounded semiotic-cultural psychological interpretation of such a scenario. First, we underline how the actual emotional reaction (mainly of fear) of our society is a marker of how the mind functions in conditions of affective activation related to heightened uncertainty: it produces global, homogenizing and generalizing embodied interpretations of reality, at the cost of more fine-grained and differentiated analytical thought. Such a process, called affective semiosis, represents an adaptive response to the emergency in the short-term. Second, we argue that this adaptive value provided by affective semiosis will be reduced when we have to deal with the process of managing the transition to the post-crisis and the governance of the medium and long-term impact of the crisis. Third, we suggest that, in order to manage the pandemic crisis on a longer temporal frame, affective semiosis has to be integrated with less generalized and more domain-specific ways of interpreting reality. To this end, semiotic capital (i.e., culturally-mediated symbolic resources) should be promoted in order to enable people to interiorize the supra-individual and collective dimension of life. Accordingly, COVID-19 is proposed as a semiotic vaccine, a disruption in our everyday life routines which has the potential of opening the way to a semiotic re-appropriation of the collective dimensions of our experience.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Maternal Distress/Coping and Children's Adaptive Behaviors During the COVID-19 Lockdown: Mediation Through Children's Emotional Experience.
TL;DR: It is important to support parents during pandemic emergence, by providing them with adequate information to manage the relationship with their children, to reduce their level of distress and to enhance their coping abilities.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Meaning of Living in the Time of COVID-19. A Large Sample Narrative Inquiry
TL;DR: The symbolic universes (SUs) through which Italian people represented the pandemic crisis and its meaning in their life were explored to examine how the interpretation of the crisis varies over societal segments with different sociodemographic characteristics and specific life challenges.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fostering the Reconstruction of Meaning Among the General Population During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Marco Castiglioni,Nicolò Gaj +1 more
TL;DR: The present article proposes a methodological perspective based on the reconstruction of meaning-making processes, which implies that among those who may require help–aside from the main targets of psychological intervention, such as healthcare personnel and COVID-19 patients and their relatives–specific attention should be paid to those who are not at the center of the crisis.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious.
TL;DR: Cognitive-experiential self-theory integrates the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious by assuming the existence of two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: a rational system and an emotionally driven experiential system.
Journal ArticleDOI
How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic?
TL;DR: In this view, COVID-19 has developed into a pandemic, with small chains of transmission in many countries and large chains resulting in extensive spread in a few countries, such as Italy, Iran, South Korea, and Japan and it is unclear whether other countries can implement the stringent measures China eventually adopted.
Journal ArticleDOI
COVID-19 and Italy: what next?
Andrea Remuzzi,Giuseppe Remuzzi +1 more
TL;DR: Analysis of the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Italy might help political leaders and health authorities to allocate enough resources, including personnel, beds, and intensive care facilities, to manage the situation in the next few days and weeks.