ABSTRACT
Dear friend, What else could you have done? This woman was lucky to meet you, to meet
someone who could distinguish between psychopathology and that which is simply human and which we all share.
Recently, I had a similar request from a patient, a man who had suddenly lost his beloved. He was in despair. He screamed with pain, lamented the uselessness of his love, the absurdity of life. I said I would try to help him. I did not say “help you go through this experience” because when one is experiencing such pain, it feels as if it will last forever. But I said right away: “The way you are reacting to your wife’s death, the extent of your suffering, your anger with life, your breakdown – these are all signs of psychic health. You say that you are sick with pain. How could you not be when you just lost the person you loved most? You say that you don’t want to go on living. How could you want to go on when the person who is your support in life suddenly disappears? If you were not sick with pain, if you did not want to die, the love you felt for your beloved would not have existed, would not have been real. Psychic health is what allows us to experience what we must experience. What would be unhealthy would be to block this pain, what would be pathological would be to deny the suffering and loss.”
