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Memory, Mourning and Meaning in a Psychotherapist’s Life

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Abstract

In this paper the author, a psychotherapist specializing in bereavement, recounts her personal experiences of loss and the ways in which they intersect and inform her professional life. One clinical vignette explores how unresolved grief in a patient and anticipated grief in a therapist emerge in transference-counter-transference issues. Another vignette illustrates a way in which supportive therapy can open the door to intra-psychic work with the ill or dying patient and how psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy with the aged can help them to re-imagine their lives and to form different relationships, in their minds, with significant others in their past.

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Correspondence to Sheila Felberbaum.

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Felberbaum, S. Memory, Mourning and Meaning in a Psychotherapist’s Life. Clin Soc Work J 38, 269–274 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-009-0222-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-009-0222-4

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