Social distancing and other recommendations to minimize the risk of Covid-19 infection have turned the irrational fear of contact with other people into haphephobia.
By José Ramón Ubieto Pardo
Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Education Sciences. Psychoanalyst, UOC – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Since the pandemic began, we have been receiving a constant stream of news about different mental disorders linked to it.
First we discovered cabin fever , that urge to stay indoors. With the widespread use of masks and the "prevention" of people being able to express their feelings, the "empty face" syndrome emerged.
Following the recommendation to maintain social distance, it was the turn of the "skin hunger" syndrome . We needed to rediscover human touch.
Now, we have come across haphephobia , the fear of touching or being touched for fear of contagion.
The truth is that, to this day, there are no conclusive studies on any of these supposed syndromes. Nor on this last one, which already existed before the pandemic and whose prevalence is very low.
What there is, evidently, is an increase in various discomforts: fear, sadness, uncertainty, anguish, anger… Also, new habits of social distancing and isolation linked to the health crisis.
Why, then, this insistence on naming as disorders what are merely discomforts resulting from a traumatic event such as the one we are dealing with?
This is undoubtedly because names contain fear and provide meaning where it is either absent or insufficient. That is the power of categories (including diagnostic ones): to explain the present, reframe the past, and anticipate the future.
Schopenhauer and the hedgehogs
With the haphephobia epidemic ruled out, we can ask ourselves about the future of this current fear of physical contact. Will it remain as a post-COVID consequence? Will it change how we approach each other? Will it eliminate the custom of kissing and hugging when we meet or say goodbye?
In 1851, already addressing the obstacles in social bonds, Schopenhauer wrote The Hedgehog's Dilemma or The Parable of the Shivering Porcupines . It reads as follows:
“On a harsh winter day, the porcupines of a herd huddled together for warmth. In doing so, they injured each other with their quills and had to separate. Forced to huddle together again by the cold, they pricked each other once more and moved apart. These alternating periods of approach and retreat continued until they were able to find a middle ground at which both problems were mitigated.”
Freud uses this quote to show how our relationships are characterized by the ambivalence between love and hate. After all, “every intimate relationship of any duration leaves a deposit of hostile feelings in those involved.”
Later, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the term extimacy. With it, he meant that the driving force behind this back-and-forth in our relationships with others should not be sought outside of them, but rather within ourselves.
It refers to the most intimate part of each of us. That which, however, remains unrecognizable to us because we dislike it and place it outside ourselves. Like a foreign body.
Children learn "no" before they learn "yes." They expel what they hate about themselves, what makes them unlovable to others (their shouting, sadness, or bad temper).
Thus, they constitute a first psychic boundary, differentiating the inner from the outer, attributing to the other (the foreigner) what they reject. We approach and distance ourselves from others depending on how we cope with our own foreignness, that self-hatred. So human and so primal.
The fear of touching ourselves is a phobia of ourselves. The secret we refuse to understand is that we are like porcupines to ourselves. We contaminate ourselves, even though when we distance ourselves we have the illusion that the other person is the contaminant.
The virus we flee from is the one that parasitizes us as fear of everything that distresses us and that we cannot resolve. Like those teenagers who bitterly reproach their parents for all the limitations they experience. As if they weren't their problem, instead of taking responsibility for those impossible situations.
The solution of love
How can we prevent this disconnect from becoming chronic and confining us to our hedgehog cage? Coca-Cola itself reminded us that “there is an empathy gap, and we need to address it if we want to be the brand that brings people together.” Like other companies, it proposes making empathy the balm for our ills.
Freud reminded us that "selfishness finds no limit except in love for others." He also said that love is the principal factor of civilization, perhaps the only one, determining the transition from selfishness to altruism.
But empathy forced by marketing and love—as the reverse of narcissism—are different things. The love that helps us is the one that begins with ourselves. With reconciling ourselves with our own intimacy, difficulties, and weaknesses, as well as those of the people around us.
The love that truly matters is not the love that finds a reflection of itself in its partner , but the love that embraces what makes the other person unique and different. We can only tolerate others to the extent that we tolerate ourselves. To avoid drifting apart, we must first look inward.
That is, without a doubt, the best answer to the fear of contact: to connect and reconcile with one's innermost self.
From: https://theconversation.com/la-hafefobia-y-el-dilema-de-tocarnos-o-no-tocarnos-151878