Mourning and Failure to Mourn—An Object-Relations View

EARLY DEVELOPMENT IS NOT SIMPLY a succession of gains; it is also a succession of losses. The child's ability to master these losses is a fundamental determinant of future development. British psychoanalytic theory is rooted in the primacy of relationships for early development, and the process by which the child's ego copes with loss plays a significant part in. In this body of work we find a foundation for understanding the capacity to mourn. Klein (1940) predicates the achievement of whole object relationships on the capacity to mourn and to recover from loss. In Winnicott's (1969) thinking, the child's gradual transition from illusions of omnipotence to secure reality orientation is framed by this experience. One's ability to cope with loss as an adult is dependent on these early processes. In this paper I explore the British theorists' ideas, especially those of Klein, as an explanation of the intrapsychic grief process. I also consider how loss may fail to be resolved: under what circumstances is mourning impossible and what does this failure look like in adult development?

Freud's work in "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) gives a brief account of the usual course of mourning. There is first a period of shock and denial, then there is the long period of working-through. One never relinquishes one's attachment to important objects willingly. When confronted initially with loss, one abandons reality instead of abandoning the object ["a turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of hallucinatory wish fulfillment" (p. 154)]. The mourner reacts as if somehow the information is wrong; the loved one is not really dead or has not really left.

Eventually, Freud argued, one's narcissism rescues the ego. The ego begins to be weakened by the turn away from reality until a