GeistHaus

Object Relations

Mourning and Loss

Someone dies, or leaves, or a version of your life ends: a marriage, a job, a country, the body you used to have. What follows is not a single feeling but a long piece of work that the mind does mostly on its own schedule. Psychoanalysis calls that work mourning, and it is one of the few things the field has studied continuously for over a century, from Freud’s short paper in 1917 to the grief research of the last thirty years.

The central discovery is counterintuitive. We do not get over the people we lose. We take them in. Freud described mourning as a slow withdrawal from the world and a slow return, and he noticed that in melancholia the lost person had been taken inside the self (Freud, 1917). He saw that as what went wrong. Later writers found that the taking-in is not a failure to let go but the normal outcome of grief: the dead and the departed become internal objects, carried for the rest of a life.

That is why loss belongs in a section about relationships. Grief is a relationship continuing under new terms, and the way a person grieves is shaped by the way they attach, by what the relationship was, and by what else they have lost before.

Core Ideas

How It Shows Up in Everyday Life

How Different Thinkers See It

Freud: Mourning and Melancholia

Freud’s 1917 paper set the terms. In ordinary mourning, he wrote, the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia, what we would now call a depressive collapse, it is the self that becomes poor and empty. His explanation was that the melancholic has lost someone toward whom they felt both love and hate, has taken that person inside, and now directs the hate at the part of the self that stands for them. The self-reproach of depression is, in his famous phrase, the shadow of the object falling on the ego (Freud, 1917). The paper also described the work of mourning itself as a slow, reality-driven detachment from each memory in turn. Freud’s own later experience complicated that picture. In a letter written years after his daughter’s death he said that the acute grief passes, but that one remains inconsolable and does not wish to find a substitute, because that would be a way of abandoning the person one loved (Freud, 1960).

Klein: Mourning and the Depressive Position

Melanie Klein argued that every adult loss reactivates the infant’s earliest experience of losing and recovering the mother, and that mourning succeeds when a person can re-establish the good internal object that the loss seemed to destroy (Klein, 1940). For Klein, grief is shadowed by the fear that one’s own anger has damaged the lost person, and by the wish to repair. Successful mourning is a return to the depressive position: sorrow, guilt and gratitude held together, with the inner world restored and even enriched. Manic flight from grief, by contrast, denies that anything of value has been lost.

Bowlby: Attachment and Loss

John Bowlby treated grief as the activation of the attachment system when the attachment figure is gone. The searching, protest and restlessness of early grief are, in his view, the behavior of a creature trying to recover someone it cannot do without (Bowlby, 1980). He described phases of numbing, yearning and searching, disorganization and despair, and reorganization, and he stressed that these overlap and recur rather than proceeding in order. Bowlby also argued, against the detachment reading of Freud, that a continuing inner relationship with the dead is normal and often helpful. See attachment.

Worden: Tasks Rather Than Stages

William Worden reframed grief as a set of tasks rather than a sequence of stages: accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of it, adjusting to a world without the person, and finding an enduring connection with them while embarking on a new life (Worden, 2009). The task language was meant to give the mourner something to do and to remove the implication that grief runs on a timetable.

Stroebe and Schut: The Dual Process

Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut observed that bereaved people do not grieve continuously. They oscillate between loss-oriented activity, such as crying, remembering and yearning, and restoration-oriented activity, such as learning to cook, handling the finances, and building new roles, and they also take breaks from both (Stroebe & Schut, 1999). The oscillation is itself the healthy pattern; being stuck in either mode is where trouble begins.

Continuing Bonds

A 1996 collection edited by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman gathered evidence that bereaved people of all ages maintain an inner relationship with the dead, talking to them, consulting them, keeping their things, and that this is associated with good adjustment, not bad (Klass, Silverman & Nickman, 1996). The finding brought grief research back to what Freud and Klein had each seen in their own way: the lost person becomes part of the mourner.

Stages, and the Evidence

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages were written about dying patients, not the bereaved (Kübler-Ross, 1969), and later became a popular map of grief. When the stages were tested in bereaved people, acceptance, not denial, turned out to be the most common state even in the first months, and the negative responses overlapped rather than succeeding one another cleanly (Maciejewski et al., 2007). George Bonanno’s research found that the most common trajectory after loss is resilience: real sadness, but continued functioning, in a majority of people (Bonanno, 2004). A minority experience prolonged, disabling grief, and for them help matters.

Ambiguous Loss

Pauline Boss named the special difficulty of losses without closure: a person physically present but psychologically gone, as in dementia, or physically gone but psychologically present, as with a missing person or an estranged parent (Boss, 1999). Mourning needs a fact to work on, and ambiguous loss withholds it. The task becomes living with not knowing.

Examples

These are composite vignettes, not real people.

The Phone

Six months after her mother dies, Lena still narrates her days to her in the car. She has not told anyone, because it sounds like she is not coping. Her mother was also the person she fought with most, and some of what Lena says in the car is argument. A friend who lost her own father says, “Oh, I do that too.” Lena notices that the conversations are getting shorter and kinder, and that she has started to answer for her mother in a voice that is partly her own.

The Layoff

Marcus loses a job he had for eleven years. He is practical about it, updates his résumé, and is surprised to find himself unable to sleep, irritable with his kids, and bereft in a way the money does not explain. He had not thought of the company as something he loved. He had thought of it as a paycheck. The grief is for a self that no longer exists, the one who was competent and known there, and for the future he had quietly planned. Naming it as grief, rather than as weakness or a bad attitude, is what lets him start.

The Anniversary

Every November, Sam feels flat and withdrawn and assumes it is the weather. He is forty-four. His father died in November when Sam was nine. The link has never occurred to him, because the grief was done so long ago. Grief that was never fully worked through has a way of keeping the date. See anniversary reactions.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Depression
Grief comes in waves, is about the loss, and usually leaves self-esteem intact. Depression is more constant, generalizes to everything, and attacks the self. Freud’s paper is the classic account of the difference, and of how one can slide into the other. See the depressive style.
Denial
Early numbness and disbelief are a normal first response that buys time. It becomes the defense of denial only when it persists and keeps the loss from being worked on at all.
Manic flight
Throwing oneself into activity, new relationships or triumph immediately after a loss can be a way of insisting that nothing important has gone. Klein described it as the manic defense against the pain of the depressive position.
Melancholic identification
Taking on the lost person’s symptoms, illness or failings, or turning one’s anger at them against oneself. See identification.

History

Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) founded the subject and, almost incidentally, founded object relations theory, since it was the first clear account of how a lost person becomes part of the self. Karl Abraham extended it in his studies of depression. Klein made mourning central to her picture of development in 1940. Erich Lindemann’s study of survivors of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire (Lindemann, 1944) began the empirical study of acute grief. Bowlby’s third volume of Attachment and Loss (1980) gave grief its attachment-theory account and argued for the normality of continuing bonds, which the Klass, Silverman and Nickman collection documented in 1996. Worden’s tasks (first edition 1982) and Stroebe and Schut’s dual process model (1999) replaced stage thinking in clinical practice, while Bonanno’s work showed that most people grieve without lasting damage. The current diagnostic manuals now recognize a prolonged grief disorder for the minority who do not, a decision still debated.

Sources