ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the principles of technique that apply to the management of interludes during which illness, injury, and death take place in the life of either the patient or the therapist. Inevitably, a therapist will be deeply affected by his or her patient's death-related experiences. Death anxieties evoke psychological, communicative, and action defences in both patient and therapist. In principle, then, therapists should refrain from offering direct comments and explanations of patients' reactions to death-connected events outside the therapy. There are a number of special problems of technique that arise in connection with the dying patient, whether death is impending when the patient enters therapy or arises during the course of treatment. Death is one of the most compelling and anxiety-provoking parts of life. Finally, it is all too human for therapists, given their own unmastered death anxieties, to wish to become openly compassionate, non-interpretative, and frame-altering when patients are suffering from acute death-related traumas.
