Mourning in Children a Theoretical Synthesis and Clinical Application

Historically, child psychoanalysts have been of two minds about how children deal with the loss of a parent. In the 1960s and early 1970s, there emerged a sharp cleavage in conceptions of the mourning capabilities of the child. Psychoanalytic authors such as Bowlby (1960), Furman (1964), Kliman (1968, 1972), and Lopez and Kliman (1979) stated that mourning occurs in children but only under certain conditions. If a child has achieved object constancy and has the ability to identify and verbalize affects, then the three- to four-year-old child is capable of mourning, but only under favorable circumstances can mourning occur. The main prerequisite is that the child be provided with an adequate adult caretaker who will meet the child's needs and allow him or her to express feelings about the loss.

The second group of studies in the literature, involving large numbers of children who have lost a parent by death, concluded that children use a variety of complex, tenacious, and predictable defenses to avoid dealing with the loss. Wolfenstein (1966, 1969) presented the most complete exposition of the psychoanalytic view of children's reactions to the death of a parent. She reported clinical data from a study of 42 children ranging in age from latency through adolescence who lost a parent by death. She found that the process of mourning as outlined by Freud (1917) and later elaborated by writers such as Bowlby (1960) and Pollock (1961) did not occur among these children. Wolfenstein indicated that the children were denying, overtly or unconsciously, the finality of the loss. She further pointed out that the finality of the parent's death coexisted with a correct conscious acknowledgment of what had occurred. There was a defensive split of the ego, allowing the death to be denied and the attachment to the dead parent to be maintained. A number of other psychoanalytic researchers, such as Nagera (1970) in his work with children and Fleming and Altschul (1963, 1968) in their wor