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Any really useful paper pulls the reader into dialogue and thus becomes a classic. Quoting Judah Golden,
A work becomes a classic the minute I discover that my many moods, my perceptions, my spontaneous terms of reference, my recurring images are startlingly anticipated and given precise formulation by (and in) that work. It sharpens my eyesight, it cleans my mind of the fuzziness produced by my own lack of talent and laziness, it teaches me the words that I need for soliloquy and conversation.… Whoever correctly discovers and uses the right words reveals the world and my life to me, and ever after governs me. He teaches me also to recognize and speak the truth. (Goldin, in Agnon, p. vii)
The topic of disaster and death leads to thoughts on spirituality and religion. I am responding from my Jewish perspective, relating the issue of termination in analysis to the holy day of Yom Kippur. Freud considered himself a Godless Jew. I wonder if his avoidance of his religious traditions dovetails with his avoidance of discussing with colleagues or patients the technical issues raised by his cancer. His quest for privacy reinforced his followers' silences regarding their own thoughts and feelings about terminations and deaths. Perhaps, too, the rise of Nazi fascism reinforced such silences, as intellectual communities and Jewish communities were forced into a death grip of accommodation.
How can we decide under which circumstances “healthy denial” becomes pathology? In the two months following September 11, 2001, as we each dealt with our horror and panic, an amazing thing happened in the mental health clinics in Washington, and perhaps in the rest of the country. While one would assume a surge of new business, people coming to low-fee clinics or to private practices, seeking help with their anxieties and griefs, the opposite occurred. Clinics received cancellation rather than new appointment calls. Therapists continued working with their established patients but no new referral