ABSTRACT
Damasio approached Daniel Widlocher, at that time President of the IPA, on the podium and jokingly stressed how “close” he felt to psychoanalysis. Building a bridge takes long time and lot of work: design, works supervision, high costs, work progress, checks, testing. At present, the plan of “bridge” is still sketchy. For the time being, some pioneers are providing tentative contributions to foundations of what will finally be an executive plan. The etymology of the word “bridge” in neo-Latin languages refers to “going”, to “connecting”, and to “moving back and forth”. Sometimes, bridges were used for invasions and conquests; in fact, during the empire, the Romans were master builders of bridges. Psychoanalysis is well known to have difficulty in talking to related sciences, in particular with psychiatry and other medical domains, for a series of reasons that date back to the very origins of this discipline. This chapter illustrates some recent experimental data on complicated grief—the prolonged grief following bereavement.
