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André Green’s masterful study of the psychodynamic consequences of the mother’s psychological death in the early years of life has become an indispensable source of inspiration for any work dealing with related clinical psychodynamics. The present chapter is meant as a tribute, and a testimony to my clinical and theoretical indebtedness towards André Green.
In his paper, Green described and analysed the many layers that had to be peeled off, one by one, during the psychoanalysis of male and female patients suffering the psychological loss of the mother early in life—a mother still alive, but emotionally unavailable to the child owing to sudden depression caused by a severe loss. The analysis proceeds from the most superficial layers to the very deep. Initial work on the characterological depressive structure, for instance, will expose a depression with many faces or meanings; the patient feels depressed but for a long time remains unaware of his unconscious identification with his depressed mother—his only way of keeping her alive, buried so to speak within himself. In the final stages, the analysis reveals a deep-seated longing for the ideal loving mother, the good mother that preceded the depressed one, and Green elaborates on the refusal to give up and mourn this ideal mother.
A major role is thus ascribed to the mechanism of unconscious identification as a way of keeping the love object inside when there is a great threat of loss. All this is perfectly consistent with some of Freud’s views on the psychodynamics of depression (Freud, 1917), even though, as Green informs us, we are not dealing with classical depression in this case. Putting the focus on identification greatly appeals to me and in this chapter I want to make it the centre of my reflection. I will discuss two types of patients: first a group of female patients, followed by a group of male patients, all of whom suffered the psychological loss, i.e. the symbolic death, of a parent at an early age, and f