Grief, Freedom, and the Analytic Life

Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles

9/5/2025-5/31/2026

Loss is not only a wound to be healed, it is, psychoanalysis has always insisted, a crucible of becoming. This independent study takes seriously the idea that grief is not merely something patients bring to treatment but something the analyst must know from the inside: as a developmental necessity, a relational risk, and an ongoing condition of authentic clinical presence.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of mourning, candidates will examine what distinguishes grief that moves from grief that arrests, and why that distinction matters clinically. We will consider the relationship between loss and freedom: how the willingness to grieve opens the griever to something new, and how foreclosed mourning quietly forecloses aliveness. The course attends not only to the patient's grief but to the analyst's; exploring what it means to work with loss when you have not been exempted from it.

This is a study of grief as a practice, a passage, and a gift the analyst must be able to offer because she has not turned away from it herself.