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How Palliative Care Is Unique in the Health Care System
Published in Stephen R. Connor, Hospice and Palliative Care, 2017
This includes acknowledgment of the totality of personal loss represented by one’s dying and experience of personal pain of existential loss, expression of the depth of personal tragedy that dying represents, decathexis (emotional withdrawal) from worldly affairs and cathexis (emotional connection) with an enduring construct, and acceptance of dependency.
Social Work with Hospitalized AIDS Patients
Published in Barbara I. Willinger, Alan Rice, A History of AIDS Social Work in Hospitals, 2012
Barbara Willinger, Martha Powers, Chris Carlson, Lorna Andria Lee, Mary Beaudet, Miriam Bernson Adams, John Kleinschmidt
Supervisory support. Although this will be elaborated upon later in this chapter, authors such as Anderson and Wilke (1991), Rando (1984), Robbins (1983), and Ross (1993) emphasize the necessity for adequate support and supervision. Adequate supportive supervision is defined as providing the opportunity for assessment and evaluation of the individual’s work performance, as well as emotional responses to the work. Working with dying patients evokes varying degrees of emotional reactions and investments. It follows that a grief response and/or decathexis is not only essential but must be legitimized and accepted within the supervisory process to ameliorate or prevent some of the potentially damaging effects of the work.
Psychotherapy for the Elderly
Published in Tom Arie, Health Care of the Elderly, 1981
The effects of ageing can be subsumed under two major headings. On the one hand, there may be a relative increase in the number and the severity of stressful experiences (various losses, physical illness, etc.); and on the other hand, age-related changes affect the ego’s autonomous functions and defence mechanisms. The autonomous ego functions may be affected by neuronal impairments, by insufficient energy being available to them, or by withdrawal (decathexis) of the energy normally invested in the operation of these capacities. The latter is seen in various psychopathological conditions: decathexis of perception may lead to hysterical conversion symptoms, for example hysterical blindness; and decathexis of memory may cause amnesia.
Creative Performances: Horror and Human Destructiveness in Psychoanalytic Writing
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2020
Chassay (2006), on the other hand, also refers to unmourned losses of an ambiguous kind, and conceives them as intimately related to brutal acts. She tells us that her patient Anne had an explosive relationship with a psychically deadening mother. She cites Andre Green’s (1986) work on blank psychosis and the dead mother to frame Anne’s suicide. She writes: For Green, decathexis constitutes the mobilization of the death instinct in the service of the repudiation of affective linkages to the primordial object. It becomes the last-ditch attempt to shatter the destructive fusional relationship with a mother who is experienced as at once violently intrusive and utterly inaccessible … This is the origin of what he terms blank psychosis, the erasure of the mind that occurs at the juncture of the impossible coexistence of a persecutory presence and an annihilating absence. This inverse thrust of desire becomes a love affair with death, an infinite yearning for nothingness, a seeking out of the vanishing point of subjectivity. (2006, pp. 213–214)