Letter to the Editor

We wish to thank Dr. Hyun for her very thoughtful and thought provoking comments in her response, “On Beginnings and Endings: Reflections of an Early Career Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst” (Psychodynamic Psychiatry, Volume 44, Issue 2, 239-243) to our recent article, “How Senior Psychodynamic Psychiatrists Regard Retirement” (Psychodynamic Psychiatry, Volume 44, Issue 2, 211-237). In addition, we were happy to note that Dr. Hyun entered into the spirit of our work by discussing her own personal reactions and struggles in negotiating the transitions in her own life and her own career.

We agree that the concept of “mourning” plays an important role in our understanding of experiences of loss and of developmental progression throughout the life cycle. We therefore found it curious that none of our retired subjects reported any sort of mourning process, either before or after their retirement. Instead, they uniformly described a period of apprehension prior to retirement, followed by resolution and general sense of satisfaction with their “new life.” This has led us to wonder if the concept of mourning needs to be put in juxtaposition with the complementary process of “working through.”

It is, of course, tempting to explain the absence of reports of “mourning” as the result of denial, avoidance, and intellectualization on the part of our retired subjects. However, we speculate that another process might have taken place, namely that for our subjects, the working through of the retirement process had begun well before actual retirement took place and served to attenuate the feelings of loss, sadness, and temporary role diffusion that characterize more severe mourning reactions to transitions within the life cycle. A personal analysis and years of work in the intellectual sphere of psychodynamic psychiatry may indeed provide a practitioner with an increased capacity to anticipate,