Although the psychotherapy of the dying patient is no longer an obscure domain, there remains a relative paucity of clinical investigation into this area, particularly with respect to technique. This seems especially striking when one considers not only the inescapability and omnipresence of death, but also the host of provocative and unsettled issues that are raised during therapeutic work with the dying. In his pioneering opus, K. R. Eissler (1955) addressed many of these issues, some for the first time in the literature, and he elaborated a specific technique for the psychiatrist who faces the challenges posed by the care of the dying patient.

I propose to illustrate how Eissler's technique may be fruitfully employed in the setting of consultation/liaison psychiatry and, further, to comment on countertransference and certain universal aspects