Loss, Grief and Transformation

This book is a timely and relevant book for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who process loss both in their own lives and in the lives of their patients, offering perspectives from a range of theoretical backgrounds, clinical vignettes and personal insights. This volume addresses the scope of grief and mourning between the therapeutic dyad, and carefully examines how the patient and therapist experience intersect and imbue the analytic space and the therapeutic process. The book examines personal loss of parents and partners, as well as loss generated by mass trauma through the lens of the Holocaust, the immigrant experience, the COVID-19 pandemic and the environment. There are chapters that cover how the lost other continues to live within one's mind, and within the analytic relationship, how loss impacts one's internal self system, and how loss associated with traumatic experience with the deceased continues to reverberate. With a unique focus on the therapist's personal experience of loss, and how it shapes the clinical situation, as well as a broad range of perspectives on managing and working with loss in patients, this is an invaluable book for all practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Dr. Shoshana Ringel is the author of five books on attachment, trauma, and grief and loss, and has published over fifty clinical papers. She is on the faculty of ICP&P and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and is in private practice in Maryland. Dr. Ringel has presented her work in national and international psychoanalytic conferences, including IARPP and IAPSP

Part I: In the shadow of suicide and the struggle to exist 1. Shubin, Michelle: Living to die, dying to live: another look at suicidality 2. Agostini, Nicoletta: Loss, trauma and self-disclosure: working with dreams and imagination Part II: Loss, legend, and companioning through art and poetry 3. Loumeau-May, Laura: "Vas où je vais, Chiron! Va! Va! Va!"; Disclosure, vulnerability, engagement 4. O'Toole, Michael: Finding a voice: Loss and grief in an Irish context 5. Mehr-Afarin Kohan: On the state of "speechlessness": When grief cannot speak Part III: Going beyond the frame: The therapist's humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic 6. Cornell, William: In the shadows of loss: Manic defences in the face of absence 7. Ringel, Shoshana: On being an orphan: radical transparency and mutual mourning Part IV: Mothers, daughters, and the therapist's subjectivity 8. Arad, Hemda: On being lost and found: Where patient and analyst subjectivities converge 9. Hershberg, Sandra: Mothering a child with a visible facial difference: The gaze of the other and the gaze of the mother Part V: Reaching out through psychic devastation and the loss of meaning 10. Gerhardt, Julie: The traumatic no man's land of devastation: Beyond mourning and melancholia 11. Pillsbury, Sarah: Mutual empathy: Imagined symbol and realization in the treatment of trauma Part VI: Global perspectives on loss, COVID-19, and the environment 12. Wright, Sue: Facing the loss of the known world: Personal reflections on life in a pandemic