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DESPITE MOST OF US having been touched by the death of an analyst via our experiences with colleagues, friends, patients, or experiences with our own analysts, the number of papers specifically addressing this subject is remarkably small. This is so because, like all other people, we have organized our lives so as to continue the repression of the terror of death. In 1915, Freud wrote:
To anyone who has listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death and must expect to pay the debt—in short, that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise. We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death to one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up. … It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence, the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at the bottom no one believes in his own death or, to put the same thing another way that in the unconscious everyone of us is convinced of his own immortality (p. 289).
Two major factors in the history and practice of our profession facilitate the continual denial of the issue of our death.