Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter considers psychoanalysis from a fresh perspective: the therapist's mortality--in at least two senses of the word. That the therapist can die, and is also fallible, can be seen as necessary or even defining components of the therapeutic process. At every moment, the analyst's vulnerability and human limitations underlie the work, something rarely openly acknowledged.

Freud's central insights continue to guide the range of all talking therapies, but they do so somewhat in the manner of a smudged ancestral map. That blur,...

Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter considers psychoanalysis from a fresh perspective: the therapist's mortality--in at least two senses of the word. That the therapist can die, and is also fallible, can be seen as necessary or even defining components of the therapeutic process. At every moment, the analyst's vulnerability and human limitations underlie the work, something rarely openly acknowledged.

Freud's central insights continue to guide the range of all talking therapies, but they do so somewhat in the manner of a smudged ancestral map. That blur,...