Anticipatory grief: The search for destiny

Abstract

This paper explores the dynamics between a woman dying of cancer, the man she lived with for 37 years, and the clinician who worked with them during the final months of the woman's life. Psychoanalytic perspectives on transformational and transitional object-seeking as natural processes which aid the internalization of attachment to the one who is approaching death, the creation of a ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ in the caretaker, the hospice as a holding environment, and the search for destiny as a metaphor for the work of anticipatory grief are integrated with the case-material.