Chapter 4 Freud, Separation Anxiety and Object-Loss

While hoping that this image is not too relevant to the analyst behind his couch, let us acknowledge that, in every field of experimental science, the exponential growth of the mass of information is liable to be accompanied by a relative ignorance increasing at the same rate.

Freud’s principal theoretical contributions on this subject are contained in two works, ‘Mourning and melancholia’ and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In ‘Mourning and melancholia’, which was published in 1917, Freud describes the fundamental mechanism of defence against object-loss, showing how depression originates from introjection of the lost object in a split-off part of the ego. A few years later, in 1926, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, he attributed anxiety to the fear of separation and object-loss; this constituted a radical revision of his earlier views on the origin of anxiety. These two essential pillars of Freud’s oeuvre cannot possibly be understood in isolation, and we shall also have to take account of other important texts which foreshadow, illuminate or complement them.

Although Freud put forward fundamental hypotheses about the psychoanalytic dynamics of the individual’s relation to separation and the loss of a loved person, his works are found to contain few if any explicit clinical references to separation in the register of the transference. In his principal contributions on the subject, Freud essentially bases his views on general psychopathology and observations from normal life, without referring explicitly to analytic experience with his patients: his successive models of anxiety are, for example, the child who is afraid of the dark in 1905, the child playing with the reel in 1920, and the infant who is afraid of losing his mother in 1926. However, throughout his writings and his correspondence, Freud showed himself to be particularly sensitive to the feelings of longing, loneliness and mourning which he himself experienced or observe