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Through description of pertinent sessions from the analysis of a twenty-nine-year-old woman, the author concludes that in mourning, as in the depressive syndrome, there is a narcissistic wound with an oral fixation which may or may not be due to difficulties between the ego and the superego, depending on the disturbance of the mechanism of introjection. The ego is impoverished and the superego hypertrophic and sadistic in the threefold relationships of 1, ego with partial introject of a 'dead-living' love object; 2, ego with ego ideal; and 3, object and ego ideal with superego. The differences of introjection and the relationship between these ego components and the superego will determine whether, in a depression, the ego has to deal with a 'dead-living partial object' that cannot be repaired or assimilated through identification, or surrenders to the demands of the superego.
The author also mentions varieties of this concept which range from normal to the so-called parapsychological. He has studied various cultural fantasies beginning with the normal, ordinary reaction when a loved one dies. The ego needs to deny and cannot accept that the loved one is really dead. The next stage is seen in those who keep the room or the house exactly as it was before the death occurred, and who believe in the hereafter, in séance phenomena, in parapsychological dreams, in sensory automatism, in phantasm of the dead, in motor automatism, in transpossession, and in ecstasy. The extreme pathological cultural fantasy of the vampire is clearly based on paranoid traits.