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Inner Life

Anniversary Reactions

Sometimes a low mood, a burst of anxiety or a run of bad sleep arrives without any obvious cause, and only later does it become clear what the calendar was doing. It was the week a parent died, years ago. It was early autumn, the season a marriage ended. Or it was the year you turned the age your father was when he left. The mind keeps time in ways we don’t consciously track, and distress can return on a schedule.

An anniversary reaction is a return of feelings, symptoms or behavior around a date, season or age that is linked to an earlier loss or trauma, often without the person being aware of the connection. George Pollock (1970), who wrote the most extensive psychoanalytic work on the subject, saw anniversary reactions as closely tied to mourning: they tend to appear where grief has been left incomplete, and they can be a way that unfinished mourning makes itself felt.

Anniversary reactions are common and usually ordinary. Most people who have lost someone important feel something when the date comes round, and know it. The more puzzling cases are the ones where the date is invisible: the feeling arrives, but the reason doesn’t.

Core Ideas

Kinds of Anniversary

Round-number and annual dates
The date of a death, a diagnosis, a divorce or an accident; often more strongly at round numbers like the first, fifth, tenth or twentieth year.
Seasons and holidays
The time of year a loss happened, signaled by light, weather or school calendars; or holidays that the lost person was part of. Seasonal grief can return without any specific date in mind.
Age correspondences
Reaching the age a parent or sibling was when they died, fell ill or left; or a child reaching the age you were when something important happened to you.
Smaller rhythms
Some people react to a day of the week or a time of day linked to an event.

How Different Thinkers See It

Freud: Mourning and Melancholia

Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) set out the framework within which anniversary reactions are usually understood. In mourning, he wrote, the bereaved person gradually withdraws attachment from the lost person, memory by memory, as each is confronted with the reality that the person is gone. This is slow and painful work. In melancholia, by contrast, the loss is not fully faced; the person identifies with what was lost and turns reproaches meant for it against the self. Later writers saw anniversary reactions as one sign that the work of mourning has not yet been done, and also as an opportunity to do it.

Pollock: Anniversaries and the Mourning Process

George Pollock, a Chicago psychoanalyst, wrote extensively about anniversary reactions beginning in the early 1960s (Pollock, 1970). He described reactions tied to dates, seasons and ages, and connected them to identification with the lost person, unresolved guilt, and the wish to be reunited. He came to see mourning as a lifelong, adaptive process, not just a response to death but a response to all losses and changes, which can end in a kind of liberation: freedom to invest in new relationships and creative work. He called this the mourning-liberation process (Pollock, 1989). In his view, anniversary reactions are not just symptoms but signals pointing toward grief still waiting to be done.

Hilgard: Anniversaries in Parents Precipitated by Children

Josephine Hilgard, a psychiatrist at Stanford, described a striking pattern in a 1953 paper: a parent’s psychiatric episode would begin when their own child reached the age the parent had been when they themselves lost a parent (Hilgard, 1953). A woman whose mother died when she was six might become unwell when her own daughter turned six. With Martha Newman, she extended this into a study of hospitalized patients, describing illnesses that began around anniversaries of significant events, including reaching the age at which one’s own parent had died (Hilgard & Newman, 1959). Her work showed that the relevant “date” may be an age, and that a person’s children can unwittingly carry them back to their own childhood.

Engel: An Anniversary From the Inside

George Engel, the internist and psychoanalyst best known for the biopsychosocial model, wrote one of the most remarkable accounts of an anniversary reaction, about himself (Engel, 1975). His identical twin brother, Frank, died suddenly of a heart attack in July 1963, at the age of 49. Engel had feared he would follow, and half believed that if he survived to the first anniversary he would be safe. In June 1964, about a month before that anniversary, he had a heart attack of his own. Over the following decade he recorded further reactions to anniversaries of both events, in dreams and in physical states, and published his self-analysis in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. He read these episodes as expressions of identification with his twin, of guilt at surviving him, and of a wish for reunion. Engel did not claim that feelings caused his heart disease; his account is valuable for how clearly it shows the mind keeping time.

Volkan: Linking Objects

Vamik Volkan studied people whose mourning had become stuck, and noticed that many of them kept a special object connected to the dead person: a watch, a letter, a photograph, sometimes something quite ordinary (Volkan, 1972, 1981). These linking objects were treated with unusual intensity, often kept hidden yet never discarded. Volkan argued that they allowed the mourner to keep the relationship suspended: neither fully lost nor fully kept, so that grief never had to be completed. Anniversaries and linking objects share a function: both are external anchors that hold an internal loss in place. Volkan’s work also complements the later idea of continuing bonds, which emphasizes that maintaining an inner connection with the dead is normal and often healthy (Klass, Silverman & Nickman, 1996). The difference lies in whether the bond allows life to continue.

Bowlby and Later Research

John Bowlby’s study of loss (Bowlby, 1980) described the phases of mourning, including yearning and searching for the lost person, and noted how often grief is reactivated by reminders. Empirical work has found anniversaries to be periods of heightened risk; Bunch and Barraclough (1971), for example, reported that suicides occurred near the anniversary of a parent’s death more often than would be expected by chance. Such findings are a reminder that anniversaries can be serious, not just poignant.

Reaching the Age a Parent Was

One of the most common and least noticed anniversaries is an age. People often report unease, or a sudden sense of mortality, as they approach the age at which a parent died, and then something like relief once they pass it. Others notice changes when they reach the age a parent was when the family broke apart, or when a parent became ill. Hilgard’s observations (1953) suggest that the reverse can also happen: a child reaching the age you were when something important happened can stir up feelings from that time. These connections are rarely made consciously, because nobody keeps a running calculation of their parents’ ages.

Examples

The following vignettes are composites, not real people, except where noted.

The October Slump

Every year, Priya becomes flat and tired in mid-October. She has put it down to the clocks changing. Writing about it one year, she remembers that her grandmother, who raised her, died in October when she was fourteen. She had never really grieved; her family moved soon after and nobody spoke of it. Naming the connection didn’t make October easy, but it made it understandable.

Turning Forty-Three

Ben finds himself anxious and preoccupied with his health in the months before his forty-third birthday, and only later realizes it is the age his father was when he died. His father’s death had been sudden, and Ben had been ten. The year after he turned forty-three, the anxiety faded on its own. In Pollock’s terms, the age had carried a piece of mourning that had never been done.

Engel’s Account

The account of George Engel’s heart attack, about a month before the first anniversary of his twin’s death, is published and described above (Engel, 1975).

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Seasonal mood changes
Some people feel worse every winter because of light and season alone, with no loss involved. An anniversary reaction is tied to a particular event, though the two can overlap.
Ordinary remembrance
Feeling sad on the date of a death, and knowing why, is simply grief. The term “anniversary reaction” is most useful when the link is out of awareness or the reaction is out of proportion.
Trauma reminders
In trauma, sights, sounds and smells can trigger re-experiencing. Anniversary reactions are a temporal version of the same idea: the trigger is time itself.
Coincidence
Not every bad week near an anniversary is caused by it. Life is full of dates, and some will line up by chance.

History

Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) laid the groundwork for understanding grief as work that can be completed or left undone. In the 1950s, Josephine Hilgard (1953; Hilgard & Newman, 1959) documented anniversary reactions tied to ages and dates in psychiatric patients. George Pollock’s papers from the 1960s and 1970s established the topic in psychoanalysis and linked it to a lifelong view of mourning (Pollock, 1970, 1989). Engel’s self-analysis (1975) gave the field an unusually candid first-person account, and Volkan’s work on linking objects (1972, 1981) described a related way losses stay suspended.

Since then, the idea has moved into grief counseling and trauma work, where anniversaries are routinely anticipated, and research has examined the risks clustered around them. The continuing bonds perspective (Klass et al., 1996) has softened the older emphasis on “letting go,” reframing anniversaries as moments when an ongoing relationship with the dead is renewed as well as mourned.

Sources