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This publication, like the previous three volumes of the Library of Analytical Psychology, is presented in a lucid and scholarly style, and the excellent format makes it equally readable. Rosemary Gordon first began lecturing some years ago on the subject of dying as a process similar to the process of creating and I remember how ready people were to hear of this parallel. This placed her in that select group of researchers bent on bringing our psychological insights to bear upon the neglected study of death and dying, that has been so gratefully received also from the ‘researches of John Hinton, Robert Kastenbaum, Morton Lieberman, Kübler-Ross, Cecily Saunders and many others …’ in recent years.
As an analyst Dr Gordon lays the foundation for her study firmly and well in Ch. I, ‘Social attitudes to death: a brief survey’. She says:
The correlation of impermanence with the sense of aliveness in my patients' experience confirms a central theme in my argument: that acceptance of change, the ability to let go and venture into the unknown is an essential ingredient of the art of living. Inevitably, acceptance of change includes acceptance of death, the ultimate and inevitable change…. the theme of death emerges almost inevitably in most analyses (p. 16).
But
Dying is a process… (p. 17).
And:
This leads me … to reflect that man's ability to symbolise, which is surely one of his most important and one of his most essentially human functions, is deeply dependent on his capacity to expose himself to the experience of death (p. 24).
And this is also a personal experience of the analyst in a workshop she attended on group analysis. In small groups she says personal and interpersonal themes and conflicts tended to predominate:
But in the large group there emerged quite spontaneously grand mythological, that is archetypal, themes;… These themes seemed to constellate the life and death experience of our identity crisis; they seemed to express the intensity of this crisis and, at the sam