Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Manuel Furer called attention to the important clinical issues raised in the paper, namely, the roles of trauma, grief, and mourning in actual object loss in childhood. Until recently these had been relatively neglected in psychoanalytic literature. The concepts elaborated by the author, as well as those of Bowlby, represent more descriptive than explanatory statements, since they say little about the underlying processes in grief reactions and in the ego organization the child undergoes in response to object loss. Dr. Furer questioned whether the mourning reactions experienced by adults in analysis were actually the recovered mourning states of childhood. They might rather be considered the results of ego maturation promoted by analysis. The child's capacity to mourn is commensurate with the level of development at the time of the loss, and is especially influenced by the degree of object constancy achieved by the child. Regarding the extra sessions with no time limit, Furer cited the example of a young woman in analysis with him who in a previous treatment had been given extended sessions of two hours or longer. These proved to have been masochistically experienced by the patient; they were related to beating fantasies and 'preserved a secret love' for the lost father with whom she would some day be magically reunited.

Dr. Peter Neubauer, drawing on his own clinical experiences with children who had lost a parent in their prelatency period, stated that the type of acute reactions and the variety of clinical pictures in the child will be determined by such factors as the nature of the pretraumatic relationship to the object, the age and condition of the child at the time of loss, and the attitude of the remaining parent. He could confirm many of the findings reported by the author: ambivalent fantasies indicating that the urge to recover the object is itself bound by ambivalence, idealization of the lost parent, pseudomaturation, and extrem