Mourning Alone Together: Suhrida Yadavalli’s Contribution to a New Mourning Theory

This essay is primarily an appreciation of the wonderful paper by Suhrida Yadavalli, which is more than your regular academic or clinical paper. It is a literary work of aesethic brilliance and psychological intelligence. There is so much which I admired and enjoyed about the paper (its beauty, eloquence, and flow of ideas), and much to say about it. But I will be restricting my remarks principle to Suhrida’s contribution to the theory of mourning, a matter to which I also have given a good deal of thought. As I will discuss Suhrida’s paper builds on the recent revision of what I call the standard model of mourning through a very personal meditation on loss which addresses the central role of culture in what was once seen as essentially a biological process. As we will see Suhrida’s work adds to a larger critique of mourning theory carried out by myself and others (Hagman, 2001, 2016) over the past several decades. I will begin with a review of the paper, emphasizing its discussion of mourning. I will follow this with an examination of what I see as Suhrida’s specific contributions to the revision of mourning theory and suggest some clinical implications.

Many analytic papers have their source in personal loss and crisis. Perhaps most famously, at the beginning, when the death of Freud’s father lead to the Interpretation of Dreams. Suhrida began writing her paper during a time (our time) of fear and disease, and she sadly experienced the death of a close friend and a relative. The composition of the paper was done in the midst of those losses. Not only that, but Suhrida was newly in analytic training, so the impact of bereavement and loss have been at the center of her experience as a fledgling analyst and woman seeking to make her mark in life. Thus tragedy and death take center stage and focus the narrative in a moving and personal way in the immediate context of universal and personal loss and disruption. In the course of reading her paper, Suhrida compelled me to