Time to Say Goodbye: On Time, Trauma, and Termination

Abstract

This essay addresses the painful circumstance of the analyst's death in the midst of an analysis. Through a series of dreams after her analyst's death, Deutsch (this issue) works hard to recover from the shock of sudden loss, and to recover her shared dialogue with her lost analyst within the context of a new analytic relationship. In contending with death and mortality, one is made acutely aware of the peculiar relationship we each have with temporality—the multifaceted quality of our complex, ambivalent relationship to the exigencies of time. Trouble with time shows itself most especially in our difficulties with the emotional pain of saying goodbye.

Human development is inseparable from our development in relation to time, and our capacity to cope with time is always vulnerable to regression in the face of trauma. For adults troubled by time, analysis offers a space for mourning losses and for moving forward into the rhythm of time. A full termination phase creates an expanse of time—real and psychic—to say goodbye. The analyst's participation is crucial in insuring that this process of parting unfolds to its fullest extent, allowing for mortality to weave its way through the tapestry of termination.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the discussion of Robin Deutsch's “A Voice Lost, A Voice Found” at the 46^th International Psychoanalytical Association and 20^th International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization Congress, Chicago, July 2009.

Notes

Dianne Elise, Ph.D., is Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; Associate Editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality; and past member, Editorial Board, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She has a private practice in Oakland, California.

¹Clinicians tend to think of omnipotence in its pathological manifestation as a stopgap tactic aimed at foreclosing any experience of grief. Alternatively, I here employ Winnicott's thinking to conceptualize a transitional use of omnipotence that can facilitate mourning.

²See Green (2009) regarding “the bidirectional tendency of the psyche, which is well illustrated by dreams” (p. 4).

³See Elise, (2009) for an extended clinical example of the subjective experience of exploded time.

⁴It is interesting to note the exquisitely painful longing for physical embrace that is precluded from being fulfilled with the dead or with one's analyst.