Mourning, Identity, Creativity

In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud (1917) delineated a normative path for healthy mourning, one in which the bereaved, with the help of repeated reality testing, severs emotional attachments to the lost one and reinvests the free libido in a new object. Much debate regarding the validity of these ideas has ensued since their publication and has taken various forms. In this panel discussion on mourning, identity, and creativity, the panelists used their personal experiences of grief to inform their theories and addressed various questions such as the relinquishment of ties to the lost one, internalization, identification, special cases of loss such as genocide, and the relation between mourning and creativity.

The discussion was opened by the chair, Adele Tutter. She observed that while the literature on attachment and intimacy is quite abundant, there is a relative paucity of literature on the mourning and loss of loved ones, perhaps precisely because the process of mourning is so painful. In losing a loved one, we lose a part of ourselves. After mentioning some philosophical and aesthetic perspectives on the theme of loss, and a reference to the national tragedy of 9/11 as a model of loss and mourning, Tutter touched on Melanie Klein's idea that mourning is the loss not only of the present object but of the earliest internal objects as well, which in the process of mourning are lost yet again. Finally, she spoke about the association between creativity and mourning, and postulated that while mourning often stimulates creativity, creativity may also facilitate mourning.

Otto Kernberg was the first of the panelists to speak. The purpose of his presentation, he made clear, was to describe the process of mourning under ideal conditions in which ambivalence is minimal, as opposed to the pathological mourning processes he has addressed in other papers. He described his findings upon doing follow-up interviews with a group of widows and widowers he had interviewed five yea