In this brilliant and inspirational book, Louise Kaplan draws on her own experience as a psychoanalyst as well as on art, literature, and recent history to illuminate the psychological forces that sustain the dialogue between parents and children, even after death. This dialogue -- the heartbeat of human existence -- begins with an exchange of gestures between parent and infant. Through these intimacies of everyday life, the parent transmits to the child the emotional language of his species and eventually the verbal language and symbolic communication that enable the child to participate in human culture. Once having entered into the human dialogue, we cannot live without it. The dialogue continues even after death. Using a wide variety of examples -- from the child suffering brief "separation anxiety" to children of Holocaust victims to parents coping with the lifelong grief of losing a child -- Dr. Kaplan demonstrates how to keep the voices of lost loved ones eternally alive. It is a pleasure to read a work with depth, vision, and scholarship on a subject that merits these strengths. —Betty Rollin, Author of Last Wish and First, You Cry A lovely, deeply comforting meditation on loss, grief, and the triumphs of human survival... — Martha Lear Author of Heartsounds Louise Kaplan is the author of five books, including Adolescence and No Voice is Ever Wholly Lost, as well as many articles on human development. She lives in New York City. |