ABSTRACT
The therapist may need to consider ending but most often the ending will be brought about by her external circumstances by moving away or changing work arrangements. In learning about loss, the story of Freud’s cancer shows many of the characteristics that afflict us all as therapists when endings are in view. If psychoanalytic theory has any validity, the therapist must be subject to its power just as much as the patient. The individual therapist has to throw off the dead hand of the lost person and begin again to live. Personal mental states make a difference, and the therapist has an unconscious just as the patient does. Mark’s therapist was faced with the fact that he was a man whom she found attractive. Leaving the therapist and therefore the confusion of this state may seem to be the only option and may be, obscurely, a relief for the therapist as well.
