Childhood Experiences of Persons Prone to Disordered Mourning

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realise it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'ld like to be, and you've lost your true self for ever.

EUGENE O'NEILL, Long Day's Journey into Night

In Chapter 2, in a discussion of the development of psychoanalytic theories of mourning, we draw attention to eight areas about which there has been and still is controversy. Of these the eighth and last concerns the stage of development and the processes whereby an individual arrives at a state which enables him thereafter to respond to loss in a healthy manner. Traditionally, because of Freud's theory of libidinal stages and his classic paper linking mourning to melancholia, or depressive disorder as it would now be called, this question has always been considered in the context of trying to understand the fixation point to which depressive patients regress. In attempting to answer it, we note, most though not all psychoanalytic formulations postulate the stage as occurring in earliest infancy, and therefore carry with them the presumption that the capacity to respond to loss in a favourable manner should, if all goes well with development, be attained in this very early period. From this theoretical position a deduction that necessarily follows is that, if a child has developed favourably during the stated period, his response to a separation occurring later will be a healthy one. Thus, since all these hypotheses hold that the period in question (whether defined as a phase of orality, symbiosis, primary narcissism or primary identification, or as the one during which the depressive position is normally reached) occurs either before the first birthday or soon after it, each in effect predicts that a child who has developed favourably during that period will respond healthily to a loss