Joshua - Life after Death. The Replacement Child.

“The fundamental difference between normal mourning on the one hand, and abnormal mourning and manic depressive states on the other, is this: the manic-depressive and the person who fails in the work of mourning, though their defences differ widely from each other, have this in common, that they have been unable in early childhood to establish their internal ‘good’ objects and to feel secure in their inner world. They have never really overcome the depressive position” (Klein, 1940, p. 369).

Within this paper I have considered my work with a six year old boy, whose mother, prior to his birth, failed to mourn the loss of a baby in a cot death. Klein suggested a link between failed mourning and an inability to “really overcome the infantile depressive position”. If a mother has been unable to establish an internal “good” object and has herself been unable to mourn, the question arises as to how this will affect her subsequent mothering and in particular her ability to help her baby negotiate loss and work through the depressive position.

Bion (1962) highlights the mother's role in containing persecutory anxiety through a state of “reverie”. He thought that as emotional states, both painful and pleasurable, were experienced concretely by the infant, the mother's ability to accept and digest emotional experience was essential for mental growth and ego development.

describes this when she writes:

“A normal baby's capacity to tolerate frustration is very small. When a normal neonate experiences frustration it is in a terrible state of suffering, which feels endless to the infant. This sense of urgency that an infinite agony must be stopped right away is projected into the mother. She must often, and normally can, react both appropriately and speedily. Reverie or alpha function can occur almost immediately” (p. 87).

The ability of a mother to help her infant face loss, both in his internal and external world, may be severely impaired if she has been unable to accep