A Zombie Storms the Meathouse: Approximating Living and Undergoing Psychoanalysis in a Palliative Care Culture

Enactments of palliative care entail an excess of dissociated pain and anxiety that conforms with the unconscious injunction of our liberal individualist society to "Be Well". In this paper, I suggest that palliative care rituals serve as society-level unconscious defenses that Westerners use to ward off any form of emotional discomfort. This paper follows a patient, starting with a "zombie" dream presented in her initial session, through the first 6 years of her psychoanalytic treatment as she moves through this palliative care system.