A Note on the Complexity Surrounding a Temporary Use of Denial

IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the absence of sustained grief and mourning in very young children1 and the subsequent amnesia in later life are primarily the result of the denial and secondary repression of the object loss. The choice and continuation of this order of global, archaic defense is only possible when there is either marked immaturity or gross defectiveness of the ego with a concomitant lack of attainment or impairment of reality testing. Yet the denial of object loss and especially the absence, or attenuation, of associated affects of grief and mourning are also frequently encountered after childhood. However, in these instances a denial and total repression cannot be effected in the crude and direct fashion described above.

In later life, where marked pathology of the ego exists and reality testing is also proportionately defective, denial can often be maintained solely by means of a split in the ego in a manner that is dynamically analogous to the process observed in the perversions.2

However, in instances where structural differentiation and reality testing are more advanced, but the object loss and its intrapsychic sequelae still cannot be tolerated by the ego, the use of denial is possible only if other, secondary defenses are