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Psychoanalysts apparently share in the general tendency of avoiding the issue of death and its impact on survivors, unless forced to do so by life circumstances. This may explain in part why this new volume is perhaps the first attempt to clarify and systematize psychoanalytic theory, terminology, clinical findings and therapeutic results relating to childhood bereavement, that is, loss of a parent through death.
Utilizing clinical data accumulated over a period of many years by a group of child analysts associated with the Cleveland Center for Research in Child Development, the author describes the nature of children's psychological reactions to the death of a parent, including the process of mourning, and discusses a variety of factors which may interfere with or facilitate this process. Certain personality attributes are apparently necessary before the work of mourning can take place. They include the attainment of beginning object constancy, a realistic concept of death in its concrete manifestations (usually within the capacity of most two year olds), and the ability to distinguish