Children's Reactions to the Death of a Parent: A Review of the Psychoanalytic Literature

The psychoanalytic literature dealing with the nature of children's reactions to object loss by death has been reviewed. A nearly unanimous position has been found to exist on this question. This consensus position is based upon the firmly held conclusion that children, in comparison to adults, do not pass through mourning when the latter is defined, following Freud, as including the gradual and painful emotional detachment from the inner representation of the person who has died. There is also wide agreement that a particular set of responses tends to occur in children who experience the death of one of their parents. These reactions include unconscious and sometimes conscious denial of the reality of the parent's death; rigid screening out of all affective responses connected with the parent's death; marked increase in identification with and idealization of the dead parent; decrease in self-esteem; feelings of guilt; and persistent unconscious fantasies of an ongoing

relationship or reunion with the dead parent. These responses are viewed as being directed toward avoiding the acceptance of the parent's death and the necessity to make the radical reorganization in object attachments that such an acceptance would require.