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In this fascinating paper, the avatars and vicissitudes of mourning and intergenerational grief in the psychosomatic variant of the narcissistic personality disorder are examined. A patient, unaware that he is struggling with unconsciously transmitted grief, may be under the influence of a cryptic mourning process and may develop a vulnerability to psychosomatic disorders. The cryptic mourning process, initially bound by psychic activity in the first generation, becomes somatized within successive generations.
Patients in the psychosomatic variant of the narcissistic personality disorder share the usual characteristics of the narcissistic personality, with the following added features: (1) a particular factual thinking mode; (2) a disaffected manner in dealing with emotions; (3) a deficiency in their symbolizing and fantasizing functions. Specific mediators for somatic vulnerability include the impoverishment of the capacity to symbolize and elaborate fantasies and dreams. The author here suggests consideration of one additional, nonspecific factor in the etiology of somatic vulnerability: cryptic mourning.
To conceive of introjection as the universal response to object loss helps to explain a wide variety of pathological grief reactions, including the important distinction