Effects on Adults of Object Loss in the First Five Years

Dr. Justin Call, organizer and chairman of the panel, opened the panel by speaking of the importance of recognizing the long-term effects of early object loss. Referring to Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," he remarked that, when an object toward whom there is strong ambivalence is lost, the object becomes absorbed into the ego, while the hostility toward the object is then turned against the ego. In "The Ego and the Id" Freud speaks of identification as the regular sequel to loss of a love object so that, over time, the ego is repeatedly altered by assuming aspects of different objects loved and lost. Freud also speaks of a sequence of traumata occurring in the course of development, each of which re-evokes those preceding it. Call considered that successive object relations could be similarly qualified, the course of later relationships recapitulating the vicissitudes of earlier ones.

Call alluded briefly to a case of a chronically depressed young man in his thirties whose father had died when he was four and a half and whose mother had then become depressed. The patient did not acknowledge the father's death, even though he had a clear memory of watching the father's burial. The patient had a persisting expectation that his father would return through earthquakes, storms, from the depths of the great ocean, in whirlpools, and through some religious mystical power. He also looked to other men to re-enact early memories and fantasies he had of himself with the father. He fantasied his father with an all-providing penis, infusing needed supplies into him through his anus. This fantasy