“I feel that I bring analytic love and receive love from my clients in abundance and that is very much a part of the necessary frame for the work that we do, and by frame I do mean analytic frame as well as a frame of relatedness.”
Linda Emmanuel MD
Chicago/Boston
Episode Description:
Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Linda Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel began her professional career as an internist working with patients who were dying, in the early field of palliative medicine. She then did her training at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis and became a psychoanalyst who continues to provide psychodynamic therapy and analysis for dying patients and their families.
In her work she discovered a concept that we will discuss today called “existential maturity”. Most of us have experienced death with those we were close to. We can only hope that the people who cared for our loved ones and will care for us eventually will have the existential maturity that we will learn about in today’s interview.
Key Takeaways:
[4:45] Dr. Linda Emanuel explains the concept of existential maturity.
[9:49] People die as they lived.
[11:01] Working with the families of dying patients.
[12:20] How early attachments continue to impact later life.
[13:48] The subject of love and death.
[15:35] Analytic love.
[18:19] Love experienced by the person who is dying and by the one who is about to lose someone.
[18:43] Love as a sense of continuity.
[19:05] Love can make staring at mortality bearable.
[19:43] Dr. Linda Emanuel talks about her transition from being an internist to a psychoanalyst.
[23:23] Differences between working as an internist to working as an analyst.
[25:17] When a person is dealing with mortality they go through the phases of termination.
[25:50] People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of dying.
[29:15] Dr. Linda Emanuel presents two cases.
Recommended Readings:
Ernest Becker (1973) The Denial of Death Free Press
Yalom Irvin (1980) Existential Psychotherapy Basic Books (1980)
Sheldon Solomon S, Greenberg J, Pyszczynki T. (2015) The Worm at the Core. Random House
Emanuel L, Reddy N, Hauser J, Sonnenfeld S. And yet it was a blessing: the case for existential maturity. J Pall Med 2017 20 (4): 318-327.
I will be attending the December 3rd presention and googled you to discover this presentation. As an existential psychoanalyst with training based on Becker and Yalom back in the late 70s I have had a long time focus on existential anxiety. I know patience with less than six months to live are the focus of much research and MSK’s Meaning Centered Therapy. I wonder if your work has also focused on patients with diagnoses that puncture their defensive venere long before they are terminal and work with the surfacing of existential anxiety. As well as a private practice I work with hospital staff throughout Covid and some 500 patient deaths and the resonance on their compassion, grief and clinicaly distancing. I hold you with high admiration for your up close and personal work as a principal investigator at the bench where the data is being collected. I deeply bow to you …………..
Thank you so very much for inviting Linda Emmanuel onto the podcast and introducing her admirable and pioneering work to a greater and wider audience. Adjectives such as “fascinating” and “affecting” don’t quite do justice to the contents of this episode and to Dr. Emmanuel’s work.
It is emotionally moving to listen to a colleague who dedicates to patients who are themselves near the end of their life . I think it takes courage and commitment besides the capacity to give love. I found very interesting the concept of existential maturity. Thanks for an interesting intervew