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.