All over the world, thousands of organs are transplanted every year. These transplants concern kidneys, hearts, livers, pancreas, and bone marrow.
• How should patients prepare for a transplant?
• What are the ties between the donor and the organ recipient? What can recipients do to learn to accept the presence of the “other” in their own bodies?
• What can recipients do to maintain their psychic and emotional balance after an organ transplant?
• Are organ transplants a technical interlude to be superseded in the future by cloning and the transplant of stem-cells?
These are some of the questions that Professor Stora addresses in this book, the outcome of a five-year study carried out at the teaching hospital of La Pitié-La Salpêtrière. It describes and analyses the experiences of an organ recipient — from a practical as well as a psychological standpoint — and will doubtless serve to help improve relations between transplant patients and medical staff.

Professor Jean Benjamin Stora is a psychoanalyst and psychosomaticist. He is a former president of the Institut Psychosomatique Pierre Marty and of the Société Française de Psychosomatique. He is currently a consultant in psychosomatic disorders at the teaching hospital of La Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris.
He is the author of Quand le corps prend la relève.