Easter Sunday musings on Resurrection

For Christians, Easter Sunday is the holiest and most joyous holiday, the day they believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. While their believe insubstantiates the triumph over death, psychoanalysts engage instead in the metaphorical (re)vitalization of their analytic partners who often come to analysis with the complaint of feeling empty, dead inside. In feeling their suffering I sometimes wonder to myself, ‘where was the parent with the gleam in her/his eye to enjoy this self as baby, infusing the self with joy and enlivening it via connection with a mutually attuned other?’ Is analysis some kind of ‘corrective emotional experience’ in which there is a way that together we can find a moment of connection that enlivens us both? Before we were isolated, separate, and hopeless, and then, in an unexpected and miraculous moment we meet, are fleetingly connected. Is this connection (perhaps more protracted for the faithful) not what a god promises its supplicant?

Because we can never know the suffering of others, I am reminded of Roger Rosenblatt in Kayak Morning quoting Philo’s admonition “Be kind for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden.” This resonates for analysts who recognize that all of us, like Christians who walk in Jerusalem the Via Dolorosa (translated as the way or road of suffering) to commemorate Jesus’ carrying the cross to his death , walk through the world in suffering, suffering both made worse and caused by isolation from others.