In the last few years a great deal of attention has been paid to the dying patient and his relatives, but very little to the illness of the psychiatrist, particularly when it is of a terminal nature. This paper is about Jean Caron, M.D., a psychiatrist who suffered from leukemia, and his patients some of whom came to learn about it in an indirect fashion and others in a more open way. The knowledge of his illness and oncoming death, while first experienced as severe shock, became therapeutically useful in relieving previous losses and abandonments and completing unfinished mourning. It appears possible to mourn a person who is still living and through his help, mourn previous losses while this person is mourning his own life.
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