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This estimable contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of mourning is based on 15 years of clinical research which involved Volkan in the psychoanalytic or psychoanalytically-based treatment of 150 patients from ages 16 to 58 who had become
“frozen” in the process of mourning. The resulting insights are gathered together in this book, which sets forth a new systematic description of complicated mourning and its underlying psychic processes, “insights that only psychoanalytic theory could have provided.”
Volkan's patients had been unable to use the normal processes of mourning either to loosen their ties to the internalized representations of their dead or to end their mourning through the construction of identifications with “selected aspects” of those representations “in a loving way” that promotes growth. In short, they had not experienced “normal” or “uncomplicated” grief. Rather, their grief had resulted in “disruptive identification with ambivalently related representations of the deceased that eventuates in a continuing internal struggle—a struggle between cherishing the self and wanting to do away with it.”
Volkan's research convinces him that such “established pathological mourning” differs from both “reactive (neurotic) depression [and] unduly protracted ‘normal’ grief reactions.” In established pathological grief, patients “typically select an inanimate object—symbolic bridge (or link) to the representation of the dead person—to use in a magical way.” Volkan calls these “linking objects,” and names similarly used phenomena “linking phenomena.” The mourner sees in these objects and phenomena elements of him- or herself as well as aspects of the representation of the dead person. Through the use of such magically infused links,
the mourner can keep alive the illusion that he has the power either to return the dead person to life or to “kill” him; that is, he has the illusion of absolute control over the psychological meeting ground that is afforded b