ABSTRACT
This volume covers a much-neglected topic: the avoidance by psychotherapists and psychoanalysts of the topic of their own mortality and that of their patients. All too often, the psychotherapist or psychoanalyst who is ill is unable to confront this reality in the presence of her patient and fails to prepare the patient for the most permanent goodbye, death. This volume includes nine essays which consider why the psychotherapist and psychoanalyst may find illness, mortality, retirement and termination so difficult.
This volume is a collection of essays by psychoanalysts covering the denial of death amongst psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and the effect on clinical practice, the effect of early childhood confrontation with mortality on the professional development of psychoanalysts, illness in the analyst, the death of patients, and termination and retirement as symbolic harbingers of death.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter Chapter 1|18 pages
Mortality and psychoanalysis
chapter Chapter 2|16 pages
Psychoanalytic reflections on limitation
part 1|56 pages
Early exposure to danger and loss
chapter Chapter 4|25 pages
Mortality –the inevitable challenge
part II|30 pages
Illness
part III|12 pages
When a patient dies
part IV|20 pages
When an analyst dies
chapter 140Chapter 8|19 pages
Mortality, integrity and psychoanalysis
part V|9 pages
Retirement