ABSTRACT
The author discusses being the therapist for two clients whose therapists had died. The first therapist, a clinical psychology doctoral student, died in a car accident. He was the author’s clinical supervisee, a student in her classes, and the activist president of the psychology student government. His client was a Master’s of Divinity student at the same school, and he presented with a host of primitive mental states that complicated the loss of his therapist. The second therapist died of AIDS, and the client’s three years of “work” with the author was what we now call a “bridge analysis” – the client had to develop empathy in order to forgive her therapist for abandoning her after eleven years of unnecessarily prolonged analysis, and for his own denial of his illness. Her therapy was complicated by the author’s serious injuries in a motor vehicle accident. The author also discusses the risks of therapist self-disclosure.
