Opening up Blocked Mourning in the Preoedipal Character

It has been debated in the literature whether children are able to mourn. Margaret Mahler (1975) writes of the normal separation-individuation mourning of toddler age children as “low keyedness.” Gorkin (1984) reports Furman's studies, which demonstrate that children are capable of mourning once object constancy has been attained, due to the adequate internalization of good object representations. writes of the oedipal stage mourning of childhood that results in superego formation. Edith Jacobson (1964) writes of the natural mourning necessary to successfully navigate through adolescence to adulthood. , in contrast, has maintained that when there are actual losses of loved ones, children and adolescents are not capable of mourning, resulting in pathological reenactments of abandonment and loss. Melanie Klein (1940), in her writing on mourning and manic-depressive states, and Hanna Segal (1952, 1985) in her work on capacity for symbol formation, have maintained that mourning is a critical clinical and developmental process to open up all cognitive processes that differentiate identity and interpersonal relations, processes that others such as Mahler might relate to separation-individuation. Thomas Ogden (1986) speaks of the capacity for depressive position mourning as a prerequisite for the development of the subjectivity of the self, and for the development of awareness of oneself being an “interpreting subject,” that is, one who is continually creating his own reality by generating meanings.

In the following case, it can be seen that the opening up of blocked mourning for a parent who died in childhood was the critical avenue to transforming characterological resistances to self-integration. The split-off bad self, acted out in sadomasochistic terms with powerful projective identification processes operating, as well as the cool superiority of the manic defense as a contemptuous facade, are transformed into more mature