You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Susan Kavaler-Adler's profound understanding of the developmental continuum of mourning begins with a tribute to Freud's view of the adhesive tie of the libido to its lost object (Freud, 1917). Freud compared normal mourning to the pathologically arrested mourning of the melancholic in terms of the defensive use of aggression, suggesting that the melancholic was arrested in mourning due to the psychological block created by defensive aggression. Freud contrasted the melancholic's continuous attacks upon himself, turning one's hatred toward the lost other.
While Klein (1975) focused on reparation in mourning, in her earlier work, Kavaler-Adler (1993, 1996) moved past Klein and proceeded to develop her own theory of developmental mourning. Throughout Anatomy of Regret, a sage and introspective book, Kavaler-Adler speaks about true and false regret and examines, through clinical examples, to what degree the capacity to consciously face the experience of regret, at any one powerful moment, within an overall experience of remorse, can allow for critical openings to psychic change and development (p. 22). Throughout this rich and exciting work, Kavaler-Adler provides case examples to demonstrate how, during the analytic process, the deeply human and existential anguish of regret is a process that must be traversed within the self, prior to communicating it to another. It is an internal emotional experience, felt in the stomach and in the gut as well as in the heart, and her theory expands to include not only the self but eventually the other. In a true moment of regret, the other whom one has offended is always the one with whom one is deeply empathic. In Kavaler-Adler's words, at the moment of regret, the subjectivity of the other is heightened in one sense of consciousness as one feels the keen and acute affect of grief, longing, loss, and love toward one whom one has offended and toward one whom one now feels compassion, and at this moment of regret, total awareness is