By Juliet Rosenfeld
When Juliet Rosenfeld’s husband dies of lung cancer only seven months into their marriage, everything she has learnt about death as a psychotherapist is turned on its head.
As she attempts to navigate her way through her own devastating experience of loss, Rosenfeld turns to her battered copy of Freud’s seminal essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Inspired by the distinction Freud draws between the savage trauma of loss that occurs at the moment of death – grief – and the longer, unpredictable evolution of that loss into something that we call mourning, Rosenfeld finds herself dramatically rethinking the commonly held therapeutic idea of ‘working through stages of grief’.
