On Deaths and Endings
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Winner of the 2008 Gradiva Award!Can something as negative as loss also be a positive, transformative experience?Is it possible that not only individuals but also societies can be developmentally arrested by problematic mourning? On Deaths and Endings brings together the work of psychoanalytic scholars and practitioners grappling with the manifold issues evoked by loss and finality.The book covers the impact of endings throughout the life cycle, including effects on children, adolescents, adults, those near death and entire societies. New psychoanalytic perspectives on bereavement are offered based on clinical work, scholarly research and the authors’ own, deeply personal experiences. The contributors present compelling, often moving, enquiries into subjects such as the reconfiguration of self-states subsequent to mourning, the role of ritual and memorials, the tragic impact of unmourned loss, modern conceptualisations of the death instinct, and terror-based losses.In that much psychotherapy is conducted with people who have suffered some form of loss, this book will be an invaluable resource for all mental health professionals. The emphasis on the potential of working through the vicissitudes of these experiences will provide inspiration and hope both to those who have endured personal loss and to anyone working with grieving patients.
List of contributors ixAcknowledgments xiiOverture to finality 1Thoughts for our times on transience and transformation Brent Willock 3Grief and mourning 19Transforming mourning: a new psychoanalytic perspective Anna Aragno 21Individuals and societies as "perennial mourners": their linking objects and public memorials Vamik D. Volkan 42Affects, reconfiguration of the self and self-states in mourning the loss of a son Judith Lingle Ryan 60Failure to mourn: the brutal bargain J. Gail White 68Beyond the consulting room: ritual, mourning and memory Joyce Slochower 84Childhood and adolescence 101On losses that are not easily mourned Michael O'Loughlin 103Looking at the film American Beauty through a psychoanalytic lens: parents revisit adolescence Anita Weinreb Katz 121Reclaiming the relationship with the lost parent following parental death during adolescence Glenys Lobban 131Darth Mader: the dark mother Sara Weber 146Violence and terror 159Sometimes a fatal quest: losses in adoption DavidKirschner 161What is paranoia in a paranoid world? Transference and countertransference in the wake of the World Trade Center attack Veronica Fiske 169Just some everyday examples of psychic serial killing: psychoanalysis, necessary ruthlessness, and disenfranchisement Mark B. Borg 180Death instinct? 197Notes on negativity Karen Lombardi 199Matte Blanco, the death drive, and timelessness Ross M. Skelton 206Working with dying patients 215Lessons from hospice: when the body speaks Sharron W. Kaplan 217A relational perspective on working with dying patients in a nursing home setting Stephen W. Long 237Love and death: affect sharing in the treatment of the dying Bruce Herzog 247Insights from (and to) literature 257Lifetime and deathtime: reflections on Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Beckett's How It Is Olga Cox Cameron 259Acceptance of mortality through aesthetic experience with Nature Yuko Katsuta 266Termination 279The long good-bye: omnipotence, pathological mourning, and the patient who cannot terminate Rita V. Frankiel 281On the death of Stephen Mitchell: an analysand's remembrance Rebecca C. Curtis 293On sudden endings and self-imposed silences Ionas Sapountzis 303Conclusion 319The transformative potential in the working through of deaths and endings Lori C. Bohm 321Index 326
