ABSTRACT
Using Susan Sontag’s idea of illness as metaphor, the chapter discusses our relationship, medical and personal, with the advent and contraction of illnesses. At the core of the chapter is a patient’s narrative, relooking at the construction of women’s identity in the Indian context. It opens an argument between COVID-19 and HSV-2 in assigning one an infected status, with its ramifications on an individual’s sexual self and autonomy. The clinical material enunciates a re-creation of the lost couch through a virtual screen, raising issues concerning vision as the predominant means of contact between analyst and patient. A detailed working through of the complex entrenchment in one’s transgenerational history is elicited in exploring psychic states of shame, guilt and mourning.
