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Initially, like the author of this clinical material, I was ‘baffled and lost,’ as to how to think about this material, but starting with the opening statement that the patient was shocked, by his experience of a breakup in his relationship, presumably he had not expected it, as it had seemed an ideal match. Thus, he suffered a breakdown, or a loss, of his relationship, and I was struck that the conflicts faced by Mr R were similar to those of a bereaved person during a mourning period, and thus I began to think about this case as a process of mourning starting with denial and numbness, which began to make sense for me.
I thought I would quote a passage from one of John Steiner's (2023) paper about mourning, with a quote by the singer Bruce Springsteen:
The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.
The phrase ‘Turning ghosts into ancestors’ was coined by the American psychoanalyst Hans Loewald (1960) and used to describe a major achievement in analysis that can allow arrested development to be resumed. I think Loewald believed that progress became blocked through the presence of concrete internal objects that haunt the patient with their demands and that the patient can be freed up to resume development if the ghosts can be transformed into their symbolic counterparts and take their place in the past as ancestors.
The process by which this is achieved involves mourning that is taken to its conclusion. One in which the object is accepted as irretrievably dead and buried. Eventually, we must be parted from our ghosts but first they must be brought alive.
Continuing with the clinical material, we note both the identification that Mr R, ‘a double loser,’ as he refers to himself, makes with his father, ‘an alcoholic and a loser,’ and his struggle to she