ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several aspects of the Eisslerian approach to the dying patient, an approach the author find superficial in its failure to comprehend psychoanalytic insights and perhaps unwittingly treacherous to those patients it purports to accompany in their last months and weeks of life. In The Psychiatirst and the Dying Patient (1955), the most elaborate rationalizations, parameters, implausibilities are brought forward as their author contradicts himself time and again in the case histories. The dying patient gives us anew the gift of solitude. Psychoanalysis must be the fusing of two solitudes: the analysand must be able to be centered into himself so that he can be fused into the solitude and authenticity of the analyst, but only for the duration of the analysis. Afterwards, the solitudes must again be separate. Man in a group, paying heed to the group alone, is no better than an animal ceaselessly surveying its environment, unable to withdraw to contemplate his life.
