ABSTRACT
For both clinician and patient, the past influences the present. In living and in dying, we bring our personal histories with us to every therapeutic encounter and to every relationship.
Our attitudes and approach to dying and death is a social construct that is accumulated and created over a lifetime. Inter-generational influences such as religion, culture, familial values, beliefs and practices also play a significant role…. Similarly one’s history of grief and bereavement, separation and attachment, loss and gain, dying and death can influence how one perceives and anticipates the experience of dying. (Walker & Chaban, 1999, p. 147)
Tauber (1998) adds that when a massive, unprecedented trauma becomes part of this social construct, a whole set of “attitudes, beliefs, emotions and unworked through projections” (Tauber, 1998, p. 31) related to the event itself may be brought unwittingly into the therapeutic encounter. The Nazi Holocaust, which occurred just over 60 years ago, is one such event.
