Our life is little more than a gathering of days, made up of care and caring, the joy of contact and the pain of loss, the trauma of death, and memory. In this collection of 16 essays on loss and mourning in human experience, the editors and their contributors have successfully translated these shadows that haunt man into a psychoanalytic framework. The chapters are competent, if unexceptional, and the bibliographies for each are extensive and impressive.

The text has five major sections, and the breadth of their approach is extensive. Part I, “Theoretical and Applied Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” consists of an excellent chapter by George Pollock on the creative capabilities that can be released through successful mourning. (Some examples from Freud's and Mahler's