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These two volumes constitute a particularly noteworthy contribution to our understanding of how people experience and cope with loss. Loss and its repercussions, particularly bereavement and the mourning for the lost person, have rarely been studied in such a combination of length and depth. A wide variety of accounts of loss of significant persons—through death, desertion, withdrawal, etc.—are presented in these studies with a concerned attention and a wisdom that are remarkable. And Dr Pollock's own experience of significant loss—the sudden and unexpected death of his mother—has been turned to unusually valuable account. The resulting increments of wisdom and drive to care for and cure for this particular healer constitutes yet another instance of the significance of 'the wounded healer'. Healing oneself and healing others are once again shown to be near allied. In the wake of the author's own loss, over thirty years of sustained attention to the problems of mourning have brought fruits aplenty for the well-advised who will read these volumes.
Be assured, though, this lengthy series of studies of sad and disturbing data is not overcast with doom and gloom. Rather, it brings out the resilience of the suffering human, the capacity to overcome and turn the suffering to valuable account, and the various ways in which other persons may sustain and help the sufferer. There is a constant undertone of optimism in these many accounts of human distress and unhappiness. And Pollock's mourning-liberation hypothesis is optimism itself—and, as he so ably demonstrates, well-founded optimism. Valuable change, creative accomplishment, and a freeing-up to undertake meaningful tasks are shown again and again to have been the fruits of a loss and its mourning. Further, his numerous accounts of psychoanalytic work with those whose mournings have been seriously problematic provided further heartening data.
Pollock defines the mourning-liberation process as
a universal transform