ABSTRACT

This volume covers a much-neglected topic: the avoidance by psychotherapists and psychoanalysts of the topic of their own mortality and that of their patients. All too often, the psychotherapist or psychoanalyst who is ill is unable to confront this reality in the presence of her patient and fails to prepare the patient for the most permanent goodbye, death. This volume includes nine essays which consider why the psychotherapist and psychoanalyst may find illness, mortality, retirement and termination so difficult.

This volume is a collection of essays by psychoanalysts covering the denial of death amongst psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and the effect on clinical practice, the effect of early childhood confrontation with mortality on the professional development of psychoanalysts, illness in the analyst, the death of patients, and termination and retirement as symbolic harbingers of death.

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

chapter Chapter 1|18 pages

Mortality and psychoanalysis

The analyst’s defense against acknowledging mortality and the effect on clinical practice

chapter Chapter 2|16 pages

Psychoanalytic reflections on limitation

Aging, dying, generativity, and renewal *

part 1|56 pages

Early exposure to danger and loss

chapter 42Chapter 3|30 pages

Orphans *

chapter Chapter 4|25 pages

Mortality –the inevitable challenge

The development of the acceptance of one’s mortality

part II|30 pages

Illness

chapter 98Chapter 5|16 pages

Psychotherapy – a life’s work

part III|12 pages

When a patient dies

chapter 128Chapter 7|11 pages

When a patient dies

Reflections on the death of three patients *

part IV|20 pages

When an analyst dies

chapter 140Chapter 8|19 pages

Mortality, integrity and psychoanalysis

(Who are you to me? Who am I to you?) *

part V|9 pages

Retirement

chapter 160Chapter 9|8 pages

A note on retirement and mortality