Bowlby maintains that children react to object loss with mourning which is characterized chiefly by persistent, often unconscious yearning for and reproaches against the object. Such childhood experiences predispose adults to pathological mourning which has the same characteristics as loss reactions in children. The unconscious striving to recover the lost object in pathological mourning, according to Bowlby, has been insufficiently appreciated in psychoanalysis; instead, the emphasis, following Freud's ideas, incorrectly has been on the processes of identification