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Ilany Kogan has collected into this book nine previously published papers united around the theme of traumatic loss and the problem of failure to
mourn. New contributions are the brief introduction, which anticipates the central themes of the book; chapter one, which surveys defenses against mourning from within a contemporary Kleinian perspective; and a brief epilogue. What most distinguishes this book, however, is the way the author draws on her clinical experience in working with Holocaust survivors and their offspring to understand how overwhelming trauma disrupts the capacity to integrate loss. Through multiple case presentations, she explores pathological adaptations arising from traumas that span the lifetime of the individual, transmit across generations, and even cripple whole societies. Reading these cases together is powerful and enriching, and the juxtaposition of papers examining traumatic disruptions of whole societies develops a larger context for Kogan's clinical insights.
From the beginning, the reader is compelled to confront the question “What do we mean by mourning?” Are we speaking of a psychological state, an internal process, an external manifestation of an internal process, an outcome of a process, a sign of illness or of health? Does mourning accompany any loss or, even more broadly, any internal or external change?
In one paragraph that is a study in the semantic confusions that permeate psychoanalytic literature, Kogan notes how the discussion of mourning is impeded by different usages of terms:
One of the most complex aspects of mourning, and one that has not yet been completely elucidated, is the distinction between normal and pathological mourning . Referring to this subject, contends that psychoanalysts who have written about these two forms of mourning have not been able to state precisely which were the specific factors conditioning the two pictures. Even the use of the terms describing them has given rise to controversy. There are