"I think people are feeling intimate in a way, strangers are feeling intimate, about what is important in life and what is important about what we leave behind. It is a very precious thing to be feeling and something we should hold on to."

 

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Dr. Linda Emanuel for the second time to this podcast. On the first episode published in October 2019, Dr. Linda Emanuel shared that she began her career as an internist. She then trained as a psychoanalyst at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and then continued working with dying patients in palliative care. She shares with the audience again in this episode her central notion of existential maturity. Her insights on this matter have never been so valuable than now when we are all living in uncertainty and facing death. Dr. Emanuel’s perspective as a palliative care psychoanalyst will shed light on the challenges we are facing.

 

Key takeaways:

[5:50] Dr. Emanuel talks about the meaning of existential maturity: a capacity that human beings have to come to terms with mortality.

[9:45] Existential maturity can come at any age and moment in life.

[11:42] How is to be an analyst among internal medicine doctors in palliative care?

[16:17] Dr. Emanuel gives her perspective about the current times during the COVID-19 crisis.

[20:18] The isolation of dying with COVID-19.

[22:18] Some people are coming into a new relationship with their internal objects while not having their external objects available.

[24:05] Dr. Emanuel shares clinical material.

[30:05] The present and the past coming together.

[32:31] Dr. Emanuel talks about how she is experiencing these times.

 

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org