Chapter 3 Approaches to the Interpretation of Separation Anxiety

‘Vous êtes comme était mon renard. Ce n’était qu’un renard semblable à cent mille autres. Mais j’en ai fait mon ami, et il est maintenant unique au monde.’

‘You are just the way my fox used to be. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand others. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in the world.’

Before going any further I should like to clarify the meaning of ‘separating’ in psychoanalysis, in the context of separation anxiety. The word ‘separation’ is actually used in two different senses in psycho-analysis at present, and it is essential for them to be distinguished both theoretically and clinically.

In the first sense of the term, ‘separation’ means that one person parts from another with whom he has forged a relationship of trust. It may be said that the individual concerned knows whom he has cathected, whom he is missing, who he is himself and what the person who is temporarily absent is causing him to feel: loneliness, sadness, anger or pain, but also sometimes relief and freedom, these feelings not being mutually exclusive. Separation forms part of the context of a relationship in which the other person is felt to be free to come and go, free to choose his relationships or to give them up, and in which separation in space and time does not necessarily signify the breaking off of affective links with the object or loss of the love of the object, because the object, being deemed reliable, will not take advantage of the separation to abandon the subject. Interpersonal relations do not then require the constant presence of the object, even if this presence gives rise to satisfaction in the relationship and its absence to dissatisfaction. The temporary nature of the separation

entails the hope of a return, even if every separation arouses fear of the ever possible eventuality of permanent real loss or a loss of love. In other words, the absence of the cathected person inf