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Venuleo C, Gelo OCG, Salvatore S. Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2020;17(2):117-130doi: 10.36131/CN20200218.
Venuleo, C., Gelo, O. C. G., & Salvatore, S. (2020). Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?. Clinical neuropsychiatry, 17(2), 117-130. https://doi.org/10.36131/CN20200218
Venuleo, Claudia, et al. "Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?." Clinical neuropsychiatry vol. 17,2 (2020): 117-130. doi: https://doi.org/10.36131/CN20200218
Venuleo C, Gelo OCG, Salvatore S. Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2020 Apr;17(2):117-130. doi: 10.36131/CN20200218. PMID: 34908982; PMCID: PMC8629038.
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Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2020 Apr;17(2):117-130. doi: 10.36131/CN20200218.

Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?.

Clinical neuropsychiatry

Claudia Venuleo, Omar C G Gelo, Sergio Salvatore

Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Society, and Human Studies, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy.
  2. Faculty of Psychotherapy Science, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Austria.
  3. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy.

PMID: 34908982 PMCID: PMC8629038 DOI: 10.36131/CN20200218

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extraordinary challenge to clinicians, health care institutions and policymakers. The paper outlines a psychoanalytically grounded semiotic-cultural psychological interpretation of such a scenario. First, we underline how the actual emotional reaction (mainly of fear) of our society is a marker of how the mind functions in conditions of affective activation related to heightened uncertainty: it produces global, homogenizing and generalizing embodied interpretations of reality, at the cost of more fine-grained and differentiated analytical thought. Such a process, called affective semiosis, represents an adaptive response to the emergency in the short-term. Second, we argue that this adaptive value provided by affective semiosis will be reduced when we have to deal with the process of managing the transition to the post-crisis and the governance of the medium and longterm impact of the crisis. Third, we suggest that, in order to manage the pandemic crisis on a longer temporal frame, affective semiosis has to be integrated with less generalized and more domain-specific ways of interpreting reality. To this end, semiotic capital (i.e., culturally-mediated symbolic resources) should be promoted in order to enable people to interiorize the supra-individual and collective dimension of life. Accordingly, COVID-19 is proposed as a semiotic vaccine, a disruption in our everyday life routines which has the potential of opening the way to a semiotic reappropriation of the collective dimensions of our experience.

© 2020 Giovanni Fioriti Editore s.r.l.

Keywords: COVID-19; Semiotic Cultural Psychology Theory; affective semiosis; pandemic; semiotic capital; sensemaking

Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: Authors have no disclosures, and they have no affiliation with or financial interest in any organization that might pose a conflict of interest.

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