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Mourning, the failure to mourn and the desire to end one’s suffering are experiences central to our work as analysts, experiences that we struggle to mitigate—experiences that conjure an image of “the impossible profession.” What will ease suffering? What will restore the desire to love and work? It is in working through these experiences with our patients that we come to fully appreciate how “impossible” our profession truly is. Historically, despite a recognition of the intensity of our work there has been limited discussion about our own experiences of loss and the way that these can affect us, and inevitably impact our work with patients. Psychoanalysis can be transformative. Loss is transformative. This is true for the therapist as well as her patients. In this edited book Loss Grief and Transformation by Ringel, we are treated to a series of articles that explore the way that loss affects patients, therapists and ultimately the therapeutic action.
Among Freud’s germinal constructs was that of mourning and melancholia (1917). Freud understood the power of loss, and the complexity of easing a melancholic state. His ideas, while still important, are nonetheless limited in that they focus on a one-person model of mind. For Freud, loss when complicated was an intrapsychic experience that was mastered through a process of decathexis. Over time an analysis of a patient’s intrapsychic conflict would assist that patient to relinquish the lost object. More importantly, as Sprengnether (2018) has researched and described, Freud’s own ability to mourn the loss of his father, his home and even the death during a flu epidemic of his favorite daughter Sophie played an important role in his capacity to theorize about grief. She further asserts that this also had a major impact on his followers for many decades. For many classical analysts—particularly in the United States—Freud’s ideas were further limited to Oedipal strivings, which Freud encouraged his followers to believe w