When clients kill themselves: How therapists cope with client suicide
By John Soderlund
Freud survived the death of a client by suicide, as have thousands of therapists after him. Despite the frequency with which it happens, the scarcity of the research on how therapists deal with the suicide of a client smacks of a collective avoidance of what can be a massive personal shock equivalent in magnitude to the loss of a parent. What literature there is suggests therapists react to suicide in two ways. As humans, they may face grief, guilt, loss and anger not very different from that experienced by others left behind: simply, they react as humans who have lost another with whom they have had a close relationship. But therapists also have to deal with the death in terms of their special role in that person's life and in the society of which the client formed a part. There is no right way to deal with such a loss. Nonetheless, in this article, we present a handful of what the limited consensus view seems to suggest are ways of easing the passage when dealing with the loss of a client to suicide.
On the road with Tom Andersen
By John Soderlund
Tom Andersen, the Norwegian therapist who made a name for himself with the concept of the reflecting team, briefly toured South Africa in March, running workshops in four major centres under the banner of the Family Life Centre of South Africa. New Therapist followed him for two of the stops to hear his gentle words about how carefully he likes to choose his words (see also New Therapist 2, July/August 1999). His primary focus on this, his second wandering through South Africa, was the word "walk", a word with which he says he has a particular affinity. He told of his own professional and philosophical walking of the past few decades and how he plans to turn these words into a new book, recounting the forks he has faced in his long road to becoming one of the most humble and admired therapists the world has seen.
Prejudiced about prejudice
An interview with Gianfranco Cecchin
Interview by John Soderlund
IGianfranco Cecchin might be described as irreverent. Much of his work over the past 30 years has been about criticising the way therapy is done. But none receives as vehement a criticism as his own.
What's more, he is surprisingly comfortable with scrutiny by others of his work, not least of whom are his students. A co-founder of the Milan school of therapy, he has used spectators of his work over the past 30 years as a powerful way of ensuring that what he calls the "prejudices" that he takes into sessions with clients are always different from those he carried with him a year earlier.
