Beyond the consulting room: Ritual, mourning and memory

Psychoanalysts write a great deal more about the acute experience of loss and the mourning process than about its lifetime sequalae. Death is dramatic; our response intense. Yet long after the immediacy of death and associated pain have eased, we continue to remember and sometimes to mourn those we've lost, even when our experience of loss was not exceptionally traumatic. For many, this process involves ®nding a way to mark and honor the memory of a loved one, of memorialization.