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There are things that we don't want to happen but have to accept, things we don't want to know but have to learn, and people we can't live without but have to let go.
One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields—even to sadness.
A question that has often crossed my mind over the years is, why is mourning so difficult? Why is it so hard to deal with loss and change in order to move on with life? Patients have often said to me, “I know I need to mourn the loss of [my significant other, my family member, my job, my health, my youth], but I don't know how to do it.” Ilany Kogan helps answer these questions with her multifaceted book on mourning and the defences against it.
Kogan herself has professional affiliations that quietly proclaim her dedication to the cause of healing trauma at the individual, communal, and societal levels. She is a training analyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society and has worked intensively with children of Holocaust survivors (Kogan, 1995). Living in Israel, she has personally experienced the same communal and societal stresses that her Israeli analysands have brought to the analytic couch in addition to their internal dynamic struggles. As such, she