ABSTRACT
Jesse left the of‰ce after his last session, and I let myself sob without restraint. We had worked together for more than 9 years, and there had been precious little sobbing until the last few sessions. In fact, the ‰rst sobs were Jesse’s. The week before we ended, he was saying that he had been here for a long time, 7 years, and I said I thought it was more like 12 (in “material reality,” it was 9 years). He burst into tears and said that was really upsetting. I asked why, but all he said was that it was like I was a mother ‰gure. I did not fully understand his answer then, but when, in his ‰nal session a few days later, he said that what kept running through his mind was a song lyric that had to do with walking down a path alone, I realized that what had been upsetting was his sudden recognition, •eeting though it may have been, that I had been something of a good mother to him, and that for these long years he had not been alone. He knew well that he was losing something in ending analysis, but it seemed that just for that one moment he was in touch with what he was losing (a precondition, according to Freud, 1917, of mourning). And as he allowed himself to know that, I, too, was able to feel on a deeper level what I was losing.
