Juliet Rosenfeld is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her first book, The State of Disbelief: A Story of Death, Love and Forgetting (2020), describes the diagnosis, illness and death of her husband from lung cancer and how her unbearable grief turned everything she had learnt about death as a psychotherapist on its head.
Juliet joins Dr Lesel Dawson in an intimate interview during which they discuss the utter shock of her husband’s diagnosis, the anguish of losing a partner and the magical thinking that often occurs after a death. She also explores the difference between grief and mourning and how psychoanalysis did not help her when she was grieving.
Dr Lesel Dawson is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, specialising in grief, Renaissance literature and the history of the emotions. She’s leading a research project on Creative Grieving and writing a book that explores how art and the imagination can enable the bereaved to express and process their loss.
