Mourning and Failure to Mourn

This paper was originally presented to the Westminster Bereavement Service in London, and subsequently published, in English, in Insikten (5, December 1999, Årg 8, pp. 6-9).

It is my belief that bereavement counseling provides a crucial service to a vulnerable group of people at a time when the rest of life can be at stake. How well, or how poorly, people cope with a bereavement may indeed mark all of the life that remains to them. And some, particularly without help, may never recover. The death of a significant person brings into sharp focus the relationship that had been the good things and the bad. And there is work to be done in relation to each. (See also Freud, /1957.)

What I can share here is mostly drawn from my clinical work as a psychoanalyst. I cannot claim, necessarily, to have had the wide experience of working with the bereaved that bereavement counselors will have had, however, in the course of seeing patients in psychotherapy and in psychoanalysis, I have encountered bereavements of many different kinds. I have also had some patients who have come to me because of a previous failure to mourn. And I have had the opportunity to learn from these patients something of what has helped them in their mourning, and what has not helped.

Death in Life

Just as none of us can ultimately escape from our own death, we cannot be protected from the deaths of those around us: our parents, our friends, a brother or a sister, a child. And, I should add, there are those who mourn in ways not always recognized by others; for example, those who have had an early hysterectomy or who have had a miscarriage. Even changing a job, and certainly retirement for some, or moving, can lead to mourning reactions.

At the time of a significant death it can feel as if life itself has come to an end, with all that mattered in life having ceased to be. And yet life has to go on. It is supremely important that the bereaved re-discover purpose in life, even without the person who,