Life and Death in Loose Threads: A Tribute to My Teacher, Lew Aron

Abstract

A student contemplates a side comment that her late teacher, Lew Aron, left incomplete at the end of their last lesson together. As a meditation on loss and memory, she embarks on an exercise of imagining what would have come next had there been another class, finding something sad, surprising and resolving in the investigation. In the effort to complete the thought, she is put in touch not only with the mourning function of taking in the comment and trying to elaborate it, but also with the rich potentials parting words can hold, especially in the analytic setting.

Keywords:

• Hans Loewald
• language
• Lewis Aron
• memory
• Stephen Mitchell
• mourning.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to psychologist and rabbi Laura Gold for her permission to share this.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Altstein

Rachel Altstein, LP, JD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Lower Manhattan. She teaches psychoanalytic writing at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), is a senior editor at Psychoanalytic Perspectives, is a member of Beatrice Beebe’s Infant Research Board, and chairs the Educator’s Award for Unpublished Scholarship at NIP. Before entering the psychoanalytic field, she worked as an attorney specializing in prisoners’ rights, criminal defense, and anti-death penalty litigation. She publishes and presents on themes occurring in writing, and in the psychoanalytic writing process in particular.