The Clinician Mourns Alone: Adam Kaplan’s “Recalibrating a Psychoanalytic Compass”

Abstract

Adam Kaplan’s story and his reflections on us remind us of the indispensability of dialogue for the healing of wounds to the analyst suffering from “adherence to the dictates of antiquity” in the face of the terrible loss of a young patient. The individualism of our society deprives people generally, and analysts especially, of the communitarian resources needed to go on in the face of inevitable losses. Psychoanalysis need not continue to embody this problem.

Keywords:

• dialogue
• mourning
• internalization
• Loewald
• community

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donna M. Orange

Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna M. Orange, PhD, PsyD, teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (New York), Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (New York), ISIPSé (Roma and Milano), and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010) and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), which received the Gradiva Award for best psychoanalytic book in 2012.