Covid Trail

Halina Brunning is a chartered clinical psychologist, freelance organisational consultant, and accredited executive coach. She has published extensively on clinical and organisational issues, and edited several books for Karnac including Executive Coaching: Systems-Psychodynamic Perspective (2006), translated into Italian in 2009. Between 2010 and 2014 she conceived of and edited a trilogy of books, which analyses the contemporary world through a psychoanalytic lens: “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on a Turbulent World”.Olya Khaleelee is a corporate psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and organisational consultant with a particular interest in leadership, organisational transition, and transformation. She has been associated with the Tavistock Institute for over 30 years in developing group relations both in the UK and abroad, and was the first female director of the Leicester Conference, which explores authority, leadership and organisation from a psychoanalytic and systemic perspective. She was chairwoman of the London Centre for Psychotherapy (now part of British Psychotherapy Foundation) and for many years was director of OPUS: Organisation for Promoting the Understanding of Society, applying a psychoanalytic and systemic approach to understanding the societal processes that give rise to conflict and division. She has published extensively in the areas of leadership, including psychological assessment of senior executives and on system psychodynamics in the organisation and beyond, into society.

'The contributors offer a blend of personal narratives, psychological insights, and sociocultural analysis. [...] The Covid Trail is edited by Halina Brunning and Olya Khaleelee, who clearly approached the task with both generosity and clarity of purpose: this is a volume that contains so much that could have been diverted by rage, depression, or helplessness. Instead, the reflective and analytical gaze is steady throughout: it is a remarkable exercise in the study and interpretation of contemporary social experience. [...] This is such a humanising book, because not recalling the pandemic can only be a denial of life as much as of mortality. It would be to collude (as Andrej Leder says in chapter 11) in toxic fantasies that jouissance is anything close to facing reality.'

• AcknowledgementsAbout the editors and contributorsIntroductionHalina Brunning and Olya KhaleeleePart I: The shock of the new1. Stepping into the unknownHalina Brunning2. Disorientation, loss, and mourningBirgitte Bonnerup3. What is social dreaming telling us about the new terrain?Halina Brunning4. Guide to the new terrainMario PeriniPart II: Reparation, resilience, recovery5. Despair and endurance: the experience of NHS staff during the Covid crisisBarbara-Anne Wren6. Multi-system failure of the body and the body politicRichard Morgan-Jones7. Power, fragility, and recoveryWinnie Fei and Zhang Jian Li8. Vulnerability and resilience in a time of CovidTim DartingtonPart III: The fourth humiliation of humankind9. The virus as symbol for the fourth narcissistic blow to humankindClaudia Nagel10. Covid—an intrusion of the realSimon Western11. Questions of denial—Covid as a catastropheAndrzej Leder12. What the International Listening Posts are telling us about CovidRob Stuart and Olya KhaleeleePart IV: Our new Covidian world13. The Long Covid at an individual and societal levelAnthony Berendt14. The future of organisations and leadershipLeslie Brissett15. Dark beam of light: what Covid is telling us about race relationsLeslie Brissett16. The traumata of Covid: learning from the pandemicM. Gerard FrommFollow the Covid TrailHalina Brunning and Olya KhaleeleeConclusionsHalina Brunning and Olya Khaleelee