Mortality in the consulting room

[image omitted]Human beings are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. In this paper, I review some of the literature about how we make sense of our awareness of death and its place in our psyche. I explore how the ritual of the therapy hour can act as a defence against an awareness of death, both for the client and therapist. A clinical vignette describes how the denial of my own anxiety about mortality kept me from fully understanding the depth of my client's terror of living and dying.