Therapist in Mourning

Anne J. Adelman is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with the Contemporary Freudian Society. She is a faculty member of the New Directions Writing Program and maintains a private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With Kerry L. Malawista and Catherine L. Anderson, she is the author of Wearing My Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories: Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life. Kerry L. Malawista is a training/supervising analyst with the Contemporary Freudian Society. She is co-chair of the New Directions Writing Program and is in private practice in Potomac, Maryland, and McLean, Virginia. With Anne J. Adelman and Catherine L. Anderson, she is the author of Wearing My Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories: Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life.

Therapists have long felt required to keep their own emotional wounds and pain hidden from their patients. As finite human beings we are all subject to the traumas of death and loss, and I applaud this volume for bringing our existential vulnerabilities into a professional dialogue. Our patients can only benefit from this open and gripping acknowledgment of our existential kinship in the same darkness. -- Robert Stolorow, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles For therapists whose life work is caring for others, this book is an essential read. Theoretically sophisticated, insightful, and moving, the contributors address experiences of loss in therapy that have barely garnered passing consideration. By drawing our attention to the dynamics of grief and loss in the clinical situation, the authors have also, with great poignancy, underscored the beauty and meaning of therapeutic relationships. -- Brian Rasmussen, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Rarely does one come across a book that combines good writing, good thinking, and good feeling. Well, here is that book. Adelman and Malawista's assemblage of reports and reflections on the loss of family members, patients, therapists, and institutions enhances our capacity for empathy and attunement with individuals facing such calamities. Their book mobilizes serious contemplation about human relationships that are simultaneously transient and everlasting. A bit of sadness follows, yet such 'good' sadness leads to psychic growth, maturity, and wisdom. -- Salman Akhtar, Jefferson Medical College In this remarkable volume, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists explore their reactions to their encounter with death and loss: with patients' unexpected death, with their own life-threatening illnesses and personal mourning processes affecting their work, and with their philosophical posture to the challenge of death in health and illness. In the process, the authors reexamine critically psychoanalytic literature on depression and mourning and reveal their personal ways of dealing with experiences of death and mourning. A thought-provoking and moving work that will help mental-health professionals deepen their clinical expertise in dealing with this unavoidable aspect of human experience. -- Otto F. Kernberg, PhD, Weill Medical College, Cornell University This book makes a valuable contribution to a contemporary perspective on the analyst's experience within the therapeutic situation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association The Therapist in Mourning is a thoughtful examination of grief in the psychotherapeutic relationship. Omega

• Contents Acknowledgments List of Contributors "Another Kind of Sorrow," a poem by Judy Bolz Preface Introduction Part I. The Therapist's Experience of Loss 1. From the Faraway Nearby: Perspectives on the Integration of Loss, by Kerry L. Malawista and Linda Kanefield 2. Experiences of Loss at the End of Analysis: The Analyst's Response to Termination, by Judith Viorst 3. Missing Myself, by Sandra Buechler Part II. When a Patient Dies 4. The Hand of Fate: On Mourning the Death of a Patient, by Anne J. Adelman 5. Little Boy Lost, by Arlene Kramer Richards 6. When a Patient Dies: Reflections on the Death of Three Patients, by Sybil Houlding 7. When What We Have to Offer Isn't Enough: Suicide in Clinical Practice, by Catherine L. Anderson Part III. At the Crossroads of the Therapist's Personal and Professional Worlds 8. When the Frame Shifts: A Multilayered Perspective on Illness in the Therapist, by Jenifer Nields 9. The Loss of an Institution: Mourning Chestnut Lodge, by Richard M. Waugaman 10. The Death of the Analyst, the Death of the Analytic Community, and Bad Conduct, by Robert M. Galatzer-Levy 11. The Analyst's Death-Apprehension yet not Comprehension, by Barbara Stimmel Part IV. When Disaster Strikes a Community 12. Broken Promises, Shattered Dreams, Wordless Endings, by Sylvia J. Schneller 13. What the Living Did: September 11 and Its Aftermath, by Billie A. Pivnick 14. The Loss of Normal: Ten Years as a U.S. Navy Physician Since 9/11, by Russell B. Carr 15. Time, by Robert Winer Conclusion "The Five Stages of Grief," a poem by Linda Pastan Index