Paper short abstract:

This lecture is based on an ethnography exploring the early days of isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak in Israel. The lecture examines the feeling of loneliness and death anxiety, and the attempt to find meaning and significance to blur these feelings.

Paper long abstract:

Endings, annihilation, and finality sometimes occur in our lives in the form of events that affect our lives, forcing us to stop, linger, and accept what is known in advance and yet is denied. The global COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 sent many people into preventive isolation. A forced isolation during a pandemic is such a life-changing event, requiring individuals to stay in one place, between four walls.

This lecture, which is based on an ethnographic research during the early stages of the COVID-19 isolation in Israel, examines the subjective experience of isolated people in the face of annihilation anxiety. Specifically, the lecture addresses questions like: What in the subjective experience of the isolators raised thoughts about death and annihilation? And what, in the existential state of being in isolation, affected the cultural practices used by the isolators to obscure the knowledge of death, which was sometimes overwhelming in the isolation space? I believe that the isolation experience flooded the "anxiety of birth / death", in the spirit of Otto Rank. Thus, the space of isolation became a liminal space, and as figuratively to Rank, a womb from which we are reborn into the world. Within this interpretive framework, I focus on the key practice of finding meaning and purpose in life as emerging from the state of existential anxiety.