ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers psychoanalysis through a quite specific topic: the therapist's mortality, in atleast two senses of that word. Mortality sometimes along with ordinary defects such as folly, self-delusion, greed, lustfulness pervades the psychoanalytic relationship, its risks and possibilities, its useful fictions and awkward truths, its paradoxes and its accomplishments. The therapist is fallible, and also can die: these may be seen as necessary or even defining components of the psychoanalytic process. The striking resilience of the talking cure, its fallibility, and its dilemma of definition all have roots in the mortal nature of human beings. The therapeutic offering is, in this light, a mortal gift. Its source is not divine nor quite scientific, nor is the gift eternal but subject to time and loss, just as therapeutic work itself, like all human growth, proceeds by increments of separation and loss.
