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

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 ha

SUBMITTER: Venuleo C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8629038 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature