ABSTRACT
To sharpen the clinical sense of how death issues materialize in and affect the course of a psychotherapy experience, this chapter presents a brief clinical excerpt. The therapist's vacation is the kind of intervention that symbolically and with minimal disguise is connected with death through the themes of separation and loss. The therapist's decision to provide his vacation telephone number to his patient raises issues related to two of the basic ground rules of therapy. The first calls for the relative anonymity of the therapist, who is obliged to refrain from personal self-revelations. The second states that the contact between patient and therapist should be confined to the time and place of the sessions. For patients in psychotherapy—and their therapists—the adaptation-evoking triggering events to which the conscious system responds involve occurrences both inside and outside therapy. Once the patient had made her frame-modifying request of the therapist, her deep unconscious system was activated.
