ABSTRACT

This book is a timely and relevant book for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who process loss both in their own lives and in the lives of their patients, offering perspectives from a range of theoretical backgrounds, clinical vignettes and personal insights.

This volume addresses the scope of grief and mourning between the therapeutic dyad, and carefully examines how the patient and therapist experience intersect and imbue the analytic space and the therapeutic process. The book examines personal loss of parents and partners, as well as loss generated by mass trauma through the lens of the Holocaust, the immigrant experience, the COVID-19 pandemic and the environment. There are chapters that cover how the lost other continues to live within one’s mind, and within the analytic relationship, how loss impacts one’s internal self system, and how loss associated with traumatic experience with the deceased continues to reverberate.

With a unique focus on the therapist’s personal experience of loss, and how it shapes the clinical situation, as well as a broad range of perspectives on managing and working with loss in patients, this is an invaluable book for all practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

part I|42 pages

In the shadow of suicide and the struggle to exist

chapter Chapter 1|17 pages

Living to die, dying to live

Another look at suicidality

chapter Chapter 2|23 pages

Loss, trauma, and self-disclosure

Working with dreams and imagination

part II|62 pages

Loss, legend, and companioning through art and poetry

chapter Chapter 3|25 pages

“Va où je vais, Chiron! Va! Va! Va!”

Disclosure, vulnerability, engagement

chapter Chapter 4|23 pages

Finding a voice

Loss and grief in an Irish context

chapter Chapter 5|12 pages

On the state of “speechlessness”

When grief cannot speak

part III|39 pages

Going beyond the frame

chapter Chapter 6|20 pages

In the shadows of loss

Manic defences in the face of absence

chapter Chapter 7|17 pages

On being an orphan

Radical transparency and mutual mourning

part IV|43 pages

Mothers, daughters, and the therapist's subjectivity

chapter Chapter 8|19 pages

On being lost and found

Where patient and psychoanalyst subjectivities converge 1

chapter Chapter 9|22 pages

Mothering a child with a visible facial difference

The gaze of the mother and the gaze of the other 1

part V|39 pages

Reaching out through psychic devastation and the loss of meaning

chapter Chapter 10|26 pages

The traumatic no man's land of psychic devastation

Beyond mourning and melancholia

chapter Chapter 11|11 pages

Mutual empathy

Imagined symbol and realization in the treatment of trauma 1

part VI|23 pages

Global perspectives on loss, COVID-19, and the environment

chapter Chapter 12|21 pages

Facing the loss of the known world

Personal reflections on life in a pandemic