The Double Death: The loss of the analyst in the analytic hour

As Orpheus emerges from the Underworld, in a moment of uncertainty, he turns to gaze back at his wife Eurydice, who follows him out of the depth and darkness of Hades. In the instant before she vanishes, he sees her ‘reaching out and trying to hold or be held and clasping nothing but empty air.’ (Ovid 20, p. 236). Orpheus is stunned. He had suffered Eurydice's death once, and yet, with the gift of the lyre, he was able to endure the journey to the Underworld to retrieve her; now, however, his lyre fails him, and he experiences her immutable ‘double death’ from which he will be unable to recover.

The haunting image of Eurydice's paradoxical and poignant ‘double death’ at the moment of emergence from the Underworld into light finds an echo, as I reflect on my work as an analyst, in the often elusive process of recovering lost psychic life within the transference. At the precarious moment when the patient's split-off affect emerges into life with the analyst, and suffering begins to be articulated, this lost soul, eluding both patient and analyst, vanishes back to the Underworld.

Unlike many other myths, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is not only about getting into the Underworld, but about getting out of Hades as well. Although clinically we spend much of our time helping our patients enter the Underworld—to connect to split-off feelings, to encounter unknown aspects of themselves, to look back at painful personal history, to evoke, in Eliot's words, ‘memory and desire’—the analytic process may also require, at certain moments, the capacity for both patient and analyst to turn the gaze away from the Underworld, to move from regression into the analytic present, from memory into life.

This paper is an attempt to explore, through t