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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|42 pages
In the shadow of suicide and the struggle to exist
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!”
part III|39 pages
Going beyond the frame
part IV|43 pages
Mothers, daughters, and the therapist's subjectivity
chapter Chapter 8|19 pages
On being lost and found
chapter Chapter 9|22 pages
Mothering a child with a visible facial difference
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
chapter Chapter 11|11 pages
Mutual empathy
part VI|23 pages
Global perspectives on loss, COVID-19, and the environment