Mourning and Adaptation

The mourning process as an adaptational adjustment of the internal psychic milieu to an altered external milieu has been discussed. This process involves the series of responses to the loss of the object as well as the later reparative aspects of the process. Adaptation must include the capacity to adjust to the failure of a prior adaptation, as well as the capacity to make the initial adaptation. One example of this situation is seen in the response to the death of a significant object. In man, the object relationships that existed prior to death can become anti-adaptational after that object is no longer existent. In order to re-establish ego equilibrium, a mourning process begins. This process consists of an acute and a chronic stage. The first stage may seemingly be seen in mammalia and birds, especially in chimpanzees and baboons. The chronic mourning stage, consisting mainly of the mourning work of object decathexis, is predicated on a qualitatively different type of psychic organization characteristic of the more mature human ego (intra-psychic differentiation and object representation, memory, reality-principle secondary process thinking). Apparently phylogenetic evolution has allowed, through natural selection, for additional adaptation with new object ties after reality has interfered with a prior object relationship. In man object replacement after death depends upon the instinctual needs of the mourner, the degree of energy liberation or replenishment resulting from the mourning process, and the maturity of the ego and the superego. The cathexis of new objects is not part of the mourning process per se, but an indicator of its degree of resolution. The objects newly chosen may be substitutes or replacements, but are rarely exact equivalents for the lost object.