Mortality, integrity, and psychoanalysis (who are you to me? Who am I to you?)

The author narrates her experience of mourning her therapist's sudden death. The profession has neglected implications of the analyst's mortality: what is lost or vulnerable to loss? What is that vulnerability's function? The author's process of mourning included her writing and her becoming an analyst. Both pursuits inspired reflections on mortality in two overlapping senses: bodily (the analyst is mortal and can die) and character (the analyst is mortal and can err). The subject thus expands to include impaired character and ethical violations. Paradoxically, the analyst's human limitations threaten each psychoanalytic situation, but also enable it: human imperfection animates the work. The essay ends with a specific example of integrity.