The Psychological Life, Religion and Immortality: Musings of a Venerable Psychoanalyst

Ten-year-old Sam and I were lingering over breakfast after the family had departed. Suddenly the silent air was rent with raucous laughter. “Oh, that's the kookaburra!” he cried out. As he took me gently by the hand and shushed me, we crept out onto the porch. There in the branches right beside us was a huge kingfisher.

I was in Australia because Sam's father wanted his children to know me. When Bob was young, I used to take him and his sister to the woods where we tried to identify the trees and birds and enjoyed the quiet of the area around Loch Raven. This happy sharing had left its mark on the children and me. They eventually went west to live and work in the forests. Now in my old age I had made this long flight in order to revisit those lost times. As I recall that moment with Sam, I am struck with the realization that I had experienced a piece of my immortality. For Sam had taken my hand and shushed me just as his father had taken his hand; as I had taken his father's hand so many years before. And when Sam grows up and introduces his children to the wonders of nature, I will be there as he takes their hands.

As a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and photographer, immortality has seldom been on my mind, for I have been deeply engaged in the practical aspects of life. Why have I arrived at the age of 90 with little concern for what comes after my death? I have put my affairs in order as explicitly as possible, planned my memorial service around Beethoven's piano sonata Opus 111, and prepared my patients for the possibility of my death. But what do I feel? Am I terrified of death? The awareness that every day the time grows closer when I will not exist is incomprehensible. I say to myself, “Yes, I know, but not now!” I am grateful that I have been given the time when I can ask myself, “What would you like to do today?”—For having been given the time to write about my work with patients, hoping