Learning How to Tell

Positioning itself first in the difficult space of personal tragedy (the terminal diagnosis of the author's infant daughter), this paper explores the emotional, physical and intellectual experience of grief, and in particular the intimate relationship between mourning and narrative. Working from Freud's theories of object-relations, particularly as he theorizes them in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the more contemporary work of neuro-psychoanalysts Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, the essay reflects in ways both literal and abstract on the manner in which concepts of space are central to both mourning and narrative. The essay is also the story of a remarkable relationship between a doctor and a patient, a story of medical wisdom and the physical and emotional healing that wisdom facilitated.