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It is tempting to say that in every case of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy the therapist will be required to identify and facilitate mourning. After all, it's a sane reaction to try to sidestep the acute, accumulated pain associated with loss.
Most couple therapists will recognise aspects of denied mourning from their clinical work, as well as from their own experience. Infertility, divorce, transgenerational trauma, acceptance of difference, random accidents, the loss of a child, unemployment, parental neglect; the changing face of loss is infinite. Therapy itself encompasses mourning, as its end represents a final hurdle of loss to be worked through.
Mourning gone awry, the subject of this book, is likely to be encountered clinically in an angry or depressed partner who projects unhappiness into the relationship in the hope of alleviating their own psychological burden. Therapeutic exploration can culminate, in cases like this, with the painful realisation that such states of mind maintain unconscious contact with a dead parent or unresolved childhood disturbance. Even at the end of a “successful” therapy, the clinician may realise that the positive change looming on the couple's horizon necessitates mourning a relationship they had not previously created, emerging just as a new intimacy is born and, at times, endangering its passage into life.
Timothy Keogh and Cynthia Gregory-Roberts have edited a collection of papers by couple psychotherapists which reflect on the mental distress caused by an avoidance of mourning, blocking individual and couple development. The editors differentiate between “ordinary grief”, the cold, hard slog of intense sorrow which offers relief once endured, and “complicated”, unresolved grief, a melancholic reaction which interferes with an ability to enjoy life and is linked with disavowal.
The book encompasses a range of psychoanalytic theories on mourning, from Freud's linking of narcissism, sadism, and ambivalence in relation to mela