Harold and Maude in the Clinical Hour

Analysts are ghost whisperers. The dead float in and out of our sessions daily, and patients frequently sidestep them: the long-gone abusive father, the ancestor savaged by history, the spectre of one's own approaching end, and all the other dead who drop in, offering conversations that patients don't want to have.

However, my patient Reese has been sucked for many years toward death. Obsessively imagining the approaching demise of her parents, she takes to her bed awash in anticipatory grief, and falls into a leaden, lonesome depression. Thanatos whispers in her ear, “Let's just go ahead and die with them, in advance …” And down she goes to the underworld.

We must surrender to the psyche's story before we can begin to tell it, but for Reese, who has relied upon a bubbly sociability, encountering the collapse of persona that accompanies grief has been especially terrifying. In our sessions, we have pieced together how her history shapes her, how she went from being the only child of adoring parents straight into marriage, without truly “launching”, and a lifetime of burying pain in attempted fusion. But the act of gradually explaining her biography falls short of telling its story, and hasn't weakened the power of Thanatos, who, again and again, extends his bony finger, filling her mind with reminders of the husband who finally left her, friends who are planning to move away, and images of her parents’ house, empty after they have died. The power and tenacity of the depression, which we have orbited in analytic circumambulation for years, has frightened us both. Reese's highly intellectual ego is adept at explanations, but the Self is after a feelingful story, and without that her ego has remained a helpless witness as her psyche keeps dragging her into the imagined catastrophe.

Several weeks ago, when Reese once again pined in lonely isolation, drowning in the fatalities yet to come and mystified again by her preoccupation with future deaths, an image suddenly came to