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One of the most intransigent problems I have encountered in my psychoanalytic practice is the apparently unhealable heartbreak experienced by a patient who has been dumped by a romantic partner. As Freud pointed out, the loss of the loved object is devastating because it is experienced as a loss of the most vital part of the self.
My experience with jilted patients has made it clear that the most important response to these seemingly endless litanies of grief is patience. An important resource that I enlist in maintaining patience is imaginative literature, which helps me to find a pattern in therapy sessions, particularly when a patient is dealing with the exigencies of losing romantic love.
Recently, I have been working with a patient I call Gloria, whose live-in lover left her for another woman. Ordinarily feisty and independent, Gloria responded to this loss with an almost complete collapse. In reaction, I found myself overcome by a feeling of helplessness, which puzzled me until I realized that the collapse of this independent woman reminded me of my mother’s descent into incapacitating depression when I was a child.
What helped me to regain perspective was Julian Barnes’ (2011) novel The Sense of an Ending, which brilliantly illustrates the perplexing blindness in romantic love of an otherwise intelligent and self-reflective man. Barnes’ novel helped me to understand my patient’s difficulties in exchanging her idealized portrait of her ex-lover for a more realistic picture of a fallible human being.
Buttressed by the insights into romantic love offered by this and other literary works, I was able to remain steady and patient as Gloria worked through her grief and achieved a greater sense of purpose and selfhood in the process.