On Transference in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Loss and Bereavement: Thoughts and Associations Inspired by David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar and by Three Vignettes

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the heart of transference with patients who suffer loss and bereavement, is the patient’s plea, for the gone, to continue existing in the mind and the psyche of the patient and of the analyst. This enormous, yet simple request, constantly directed to the heart, psyche and mind of the analyst and is the core of the current-archaic transference in the psychoanalytic treatment of loss and mourning. I would like to narrate the plea and the demand, directed straightforwardly from the broken and agonized psyche of the patients to the psyche of the analyst, conscious and unconscious, to unceasingly register and recollect and enable an ongoing existence of those who are gone. This is a fateful longing to allow a continuous attachment and creation of meaning with those who departed from us. This article walks us through David Grossman’s moving book A Horse Walks into a Bar and followed by three clinical vignettes from psychoanalytic treatments and the working through of the transference that developed in each one of them.