Was It Just a Dream? Aging and Dreaming the Psychoanalytic Process

Abstract

By revisiting the last years of a long psychoanalytic treatment of a female patient, a psychoanalyst reflects on her own development as a clinician and on the changes in her experience of psychoanalytic generativity. An increasing ability to understand patient's shifts between creativity and destructiveness brings about a different understanding of the process of mourning, while the shared aging of the analytic dyad highlights the difficulty of ending an analysis that has become a way of life.

Keywords: Fort-Da; Oliver Sacks; Pedro Antonio Calderón de la Barca; Sigmund Freud; aging; creativity; death drive; destructiveness; mourning; repetition compulsion.