The Therapist in Mourning

The unexpected loss of a client can be a lonely and isolating experience for therapists. While family and friends can ritually mourn the deceased, the nature of the therapeutic relationship prohibits therapists from engaging in such activities. Practitioners can only share memories of a client in circumscribed ways, while respecting the patient's confidentiality. Therefore, they may find it difficult to discuss the things that made the therapeutic relationship meaningful. Similarly, when a therapist loses someone in their private lives, they are expected to isolate themselves from grief, since allowing one's personal life to enter the working relationship can interfere with a client's self-discovery and healing.

For therapists caught between their grief and the empathy they provide for their clients, this collection explores the complexity of bereavement within the practice setting. It also examines the professional and personal ramifications of death and loss for the practicing clinician. Featuring original essays from longstanding practitioners, the collection demonstrates the universal experience of bereavement while outlining a theoretical framework for the position of the bereft therapist. Essays cover the unexpected death of clients and patient suicide, personal loss in a therapist's life, the grief of clients who lose a therapist, disastrous loss within a community, and the grief resulting from professional losses and disruptions. The first of its kind, this volume gives voice to long-suppressed thoughts and emotions, enabling psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and other mental health specialists to achieve the connection and healing they bring to their own work.

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.

The Therapist in Mourning is a thoughtful examination of grief in the psychotherapeutic relationship.

This book makes a valuable contribution to a contemporary perspective on the analyst's experience within the therapeutic situation.

Otto F. Kernberg, PhD, Weill Medical College, Cornell University:
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.

Salman Akhtar, Jefferson Medical College:
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.

Brian Rasmussen, University of British Columbia, Okanagan:
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.

Robert Stolorow, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles:
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.