Abstract
This chapter explores magical thinking and its relation to secular rituals emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, cleaning, washing, polishing, whitening, purifying and exploiting the magical powers of soap have been experiences deeply embedded in the imperial economy of domesticity and the colonial configuration of blackness as pollution and dirt. Focusing on UK government’s campaign ‘Hands, Face, Space’, I suggest that the popularisation of a science-based protection ceremony is an invitation to embrace not only scientific reason, but the magic of science too. The latter is approached through a psychoanalytic interrogation of magical thinking. I argue that instead of encouraging magical thinking in relation to scientific-based rituals, in the post-lockdown society we need to find ways of rekindling what the Hungarian anthropologist and psychoanalyst Géza Róheim calls the ‘magic principle’; a non-psychotic form of magic that does not rely on magical rituals but on the anticipation of being looked after from others. To the magical wish to ‘wash our hands to happy birthday’, I juxtapose a magical thinking that prompts us to place a demand for care on the external world. It is only through a decolonial approach to psychoanalysis that the psychosocial implications of care and the anticipation for a more caring society can be explored and pursued in the post-pandemic world.
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Notes
- 1.
According to post-colonial scholar Anandi Ramamurthy, this poster makes use of an old racist theme of a black boy washing himself white. As such, its potency lies on the ways it mobilised past technologies of racial discrimination in a manner that speaks to the contemporary anxieties of the white middle-class (Ramamurthy, 2003, p. 30).
- 2.
Although Lofton focuses primarily on the place of the ritual in American popular culture and consumerism, writing from a British perspective Bronislaw Szeszynski adds that the contemporary turn to nature, vegetarianism, holistic healing can be read as manifestations of a need to rediscover the repudiated role of sacredness and religion in the secular world (Szerszynski, 2005).
- 3.
In late March 2020, a teacher in Florida helped preschool children visualise how soap ‘kills’ viruses. She asked a volunteer to dip their finger in water which is ‘contaminated’ with grounded black pepper. As no changes are observed in the water, the teacher then asks the volunteer to put their finger in soap first and then dip it in the ‘contaminated’ water. The grounded pepper moves away from the finger, to which the children exclaimed in awe: ‘How did it move? It moved!’. The video exemplifies how from a child’s perspective the distinction between physics laws and magic can be easily blurred.
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Vyrgioti, M. (2021). ‘Hands, Face, Space’: Psychoanalysis, Secular Rituals and Magical Thinking in COVID-19 Times. In: Ellis, D., Voela, A. (eds) After Lockdown, Opening Up. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80278-3_11
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