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Dear Dr. Loewald,
I'm writing to you as a way of getting through some difficulty I'm having in putting together a commentary on your paper “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (1962). I feel I've gotten to know you pretty well over the years as I've read and reread your papers. Rereading your papers usually surprises me because I find more there than I realized at first. I have come back to you often, seeing your work as based on something quite deep that comes through persistently in your approach to any psychoanalytic topic, whatever it may be.
Although it may seem a bit strange for me to write this letter, I somehow find it more natural to address you directly than to refer to you as an object in the third person. I often find myself consulting you, so to speak, when I am having trouble getting back to what psychoanalysis is all about. Recently, you helped me through a very difficult time with a patient with whom there seemed to be a total impasse. It was an idea you put forward in “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego”—the idea about the superego relating to the future-as-possibility—that helped both the patient and me get through the impasse.
For me, this paper of yours engenders a kind of mourning that your work was not more appreciated for its depth and originality during your lifetime. Death and mourning do not seem to be talked about a lot in psychoanalysis these days, but this paper, in