What COVID-19 Laid Bare About What Children Need to Live and Grow

The author explores the unconscious meanings of the physical absence of the three-dimensional world of people and how these play a critical role in children's reactions to restrictions in human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. When children are deprived of the corporeality of loved ones, the children's continuously emerging and unstable self-and-other arrangements may trap normative feelings of envy, jealousy, hatred, rivalry, love, and idealization. During lockdowns, there is no place where these raw emotions can be tested, so they remain untempered by the real presence of others and by interactivity with them, feeding aggression that is turned back against the child with frightening ferocity. How do children who must reside in such abstinence during a pandemic pull themselves up the ladder of growth when others whom they rely upon to help them discover who they are, are not there? A description of an observation of a young child attending a Zoom classroom is included, with accompanying commentary.