Direct mortality “100 times greater” than that of seasonal flu, national plans for mandatory vaccination, high degree of contagiousness, delays mentioned in vaccine delivery, questions regarding their safety—no day goes by without bringing its share of expertise and more contradictory statements from specialists than the others. Some will rejoice in this litany, in which they will try to form an opinion. Others will more likely be discouraged by this abundance, which is likely to sow further doubt in their minds.
Keen to curb a possible panic effect, the government communicates regularly with relative transparency, including about its uncertainties, which earns Roselyne Bachelot her legitimate “better to do too much than not enough.” However, it is to be feared that this succession of interviews and reports, which the press echoes daily, might feed the opposite effect. At the risk of trivializing the danger or enhancing denial: it will be in hindsight that we will know if the strategy was the right one. In other words—but can it be otherwise in this case—it’s too late.
With an additional factor to consider: if its outbreak turns out to be more lethal than announced, the “H1N1” flu would quickly become the “pandemic of the other.” The other, an unwitting carrier of its transmission, could, under these exceptional circumstances, intensify up to collective hysteria, a role that is traditionally assigned to it: the symbolic incarnation since earliest childhood of the external threat, the one that reveals to the child that they are not alone in the world, that they must deal with the principle of reality, until the moment when, having become an adult, they might even feel that an “other within” decides in their place, “the ego is no longer master in its own house” to paraphrase Freud. The spread of the H1N1 virus by mere proximity is capable of fueling, in the event of a mutation for example that makes it particularly virulent, a source of apprehension, or unconscious anxiety about the enigmatic and alarming presence of “the other.” We must hope that the wise recommendation of prophylactic measures—repeated hand washing and wearing masks which will delight the obsessive, “social distancing” and physical separation satisfying the paranoid—remain as effective as they are temporary. One guesses the reason: in its interaction with “the other,” the psyche may be particularly torn between the imperative to protect physical integrity—its own or that of a loved one?—and the command of isolation experienced as a highly guilt-inducing indexation.
At the height of a crisis that, for now, still remains hypothetical, human behaviors already put to the test with the economic crisis and unemployment will certainly not come out psychologically unscathed. One can always believe in the solidarity of beings. In the case of ultimate danger, we know what happens: well-ordered narcissism always starts with oneself.
