On Mourning the Death of a Parent who has not Died1

I WANT TO CONSIDER A SYNDROME WHICH becomes apparent with some clarity in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of certain adolescent boys. While the cause of the problem is quite specific and involves the patient and his family, in particular his father, the behavior which characterizes the patient and his family is general and nonspecific. As a result, the phenomenon may go unnoticed and untreated for a long while. After a period of some work, a particular dynamic emerges which distinguishes these adolescents' depressions from other types of adolescent depressions. Further, the organization of symptoms, dynamics, and behavior have implications for the study of the father-son dyad in child development.

The father-son dyad is a relatively unstudied relationship in psychoanalysis (cf. Cath & Gunsberg, 1989), although much has been studied about the role of the father, as person, presence, and symbol, in the triadic Oedipal relationship (Blos, 1985). Recently, some studies have illuminated the importance of the early