Throughout life we have to deal with major and minor changes in our circumstances, with beginnings and endings of relationships, losses and gains. Such changes often cause great emotional upheavals. How we deal with these determines whether they lead to physical, mental, emotional, spiritual growth or the opposite: arrest of development, hopelessness, depression despair or mental break-down. This book examines how different individuals approach and manage endings and beginnings in the life cycle from babyhood to old age and what helps or hinders them to learn from these experiences. Reviews: "Isca Wittenberg has become very well known for her original approach to thinking about beginnings and endings in life and as they appear and challenge us in clinical and teaching contexts. This book is the fruit of her long engagement with this topic, and it is a most engaging overview of the major transitions in the human life cycle. It is written with freshness and simplicity and offers the reader an encounter with a writer who draws on her personal and professional experience with freedom and zest. A book about everyday life by a far-from-everyday person, which I think will stimulate and charm many, because it imparts wisdom so lightly." - Margaret Rustin, Child and Adult Psychotherapist "[This is a] gem of a book. In her late 80's Isca Wittenberg writes as clearly as ever, distilling a lifetime's experience into a work of genuine wisdom. This book displays a deep psychoanalytic understanding of the lifecourse married with a searching and compassionate mind, and has the added bonus of fascinating autobiographical fragments from one of the luminaries of child psychotherapy." - Graham Music, Consultant Child Psychotherapist , Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust Table of Contents: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR PREFACE AUTHOR’S NOTE 1) Learning from experience of endings and beginnings 2) From life inside mother to life outside 3) Separateness and new connections 4) Weaning 5) Becoming a child in the family 6) Going to nursery 7) Beginnings and endings in school 8) Tertiary education and entering the world of work 9) Getting married 10) Becoming a parent 11) Bereavement 12) Retirement 13)Growing old and facing death REFERENCES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX |