This book deals with obstacles in the mourning process as experienced in individual cases and in large groups, in normative and in life-threatening situations. Rich in clinical examples from the author's practice, it describes the therapeutic tools that the author employed to achieve healthy outcomes. Additionally, the book focuses on various defenses, their function and importance, and on the difficulty of relinquishing them—and highlights the therapist's dilemmas in these contexts.

The main questions raised in this book are: How does the analyst help the patient to be in touch with pain and mourning? Is the relinquishment of defenses always desirable? And what is the analyst's role in the mourning process—should the analyst struggle to help patients relinquish defenses against pain and mourning, which they may experience as vital to their precarious psychic survival? Or should he or she accompany patients on their way to self-discovery, which may or may not result in the patients letting go of their defenses when faced with the pain and mourning inherent in trauma? the utilization of various defenses and the resulting unresolved mourning reflect the magnitude of the anxiety and pain that is found on the road to mourning. The ability to mourn and the capacity to bear some helplessness while still finding life meaningful are the objectives of the analytic work in this book.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Revisiting defenses against pain and mourning
Chapter 3 Obstacles to individual mourning
Chapter 4 Forever young
Chapter 5 Lust for love
Chapter 6 Unresolved mourning and its bearing on society
Chapter 7 Introduction
Chapter 8 Romania and its unresolved mourning
Chapter 9 From enactment to mental representation
Chapter 10 Trauma, resilience and creative activity
Chapter 11 On being a dead, beloved child
Chapter 12 Obstacles to mourning in an age of terror
Chapter 13 Who am I—Trauma and identity
Chapter 14 The role of the analyst in the analytic cure during times of chronic stress
Chapter 15 Working with Holocaust survivors' offspring in the shadow of terror
Chapter 16 Epilogue