ABSTRACT
Mortality is overwhelmingly present in work with survivors of torture and organized violence. In an important sense, it constitutes the context in which such work is undertaken and thereby shapes the work itself and the experiences of both the client and the therapist. There is, however, in the course of this work, in the meetings between therapists and clients, relatively little discussion of ‘mortality’ as the awareness that death at some point awaits each of us. Rather, it is the proximity of death in the past and present experiences of the clients and the pressures this creates for therapists that often becomes the focal point of the work.
