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Perhaps the most central of the facts of life that we all find difficult to face is the passage of time, which confronts us with the reality of loss of our objects and the inevitability of our ultimate death. We try to deny or delay acceptance of this reality, defending ourselves against it with phantasies of permanence and immortality. The omnipotent solution offered by a narcissistic type of pathological organisation denies the reality of the passage of time. In this way the need to face loss and all the painful affects associated with mourning is avoided.
This chapter explores the conflict between facing the reality of loss on the one hand, and denying it on the other, in clinical material drawn from an analysis approaching termination. The intrapsychic conflict over loss was expressed as a conflict between morality and reality and was externalised as a conflict between patient and analyst. For the patient, giving up his resentment towards the analyst was tantamount to giving up his ideal object and losing his omnipotence. In the course of the analysis, his complaints became less convincing and the conflict over loss became more conscious, allowing some moves towards mourning to take place.
Change in psychoanalysis, like change in general, invariably exposes the patient to something new, unknown, and, to a degree, frightening. It is therefore not surprising to find that many patients cling to what is familiar despite the suffering involved. Yet a desire for change and a hunger for new things and new developments drive the patient forward and bring him into conflict with the conservative tendencies that bind him to the status quo. Moreover, change always involves giving up the old as well as bringing us into contact with the anxiety
of the new, and it is often the case that letting go of what is familiar is the more difficult part of the task.
I will argue that this conflict between mourning and melancholia is critical both in life and in analysis and becomes acut