The Dutch Annual of Psychoanalysis. I, 1993.: Growing, Mourning and Affective Dissonance in the Process of Psychoanalytical Therapies. Frans De Jonghe. Pp. 223-235.

De Jonghe links the process of mourning to the mutative aspects of interpretation and support in psychoanalytic treatment. Interpretation and support are effective insofar as they induce in the patient a dissonant experience of the analyst as simultaneously both transference object and new object. This affective dissonance confronts patients with what they once had but now desire. A mourning process is thereby effected, in which patients gain psychic growth through relinquishing the illusions they employ to temper their painful sense of wanting due to loss. De Jonghe describes other ways in which interpretation inherently creates an experience of loss in the patient. He argues that therapeutic change may come solely from the patient's experiencing the contrast between the therapist as new object and as transference object, without any cognitive elaboration of this contrast (the therapist supports the patient in this experience but does not have to interpret it). The author also notes clinical problems that result when unfulfilled desire is due more t chronic deprivation than to traumatic loss. Therapy stalls when the new experience with the therapist is either too similar or too unlike the patient's past, because in these cases affective dissonance cannot be felt.