You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Leon Grinberg, an outstanding psychoanalytic clinician and theoretician, published the first edition of this book when he was in Argentina. Now he works in Spain. Although the original work that is represented in the current volume had its origins many years ago, Grinberg, ever the student as well as the teacher, has been successful in changing, revising, and updating his ideas when his experiences
warrant these modifications. In his preface to this English translation, he succinctly presents his assumptions
that depression must be understood as compounded of painful feelings and accompanying ideas with which the individual responds to experiences of loss and frustration; that mourning for the loss of a loved one is accompanied by mourning for the loss of parts of the self involved in that loss; that there are two types of guilt—depressive guilt and persecutory guilt—involved in the origin and evolution of normal and pathological mourning, respectively; that experiences of change (“catastrophic change”) may sometimes trigger off depressive reactions with the mobilization of specific defences against pain and psychic suffering. (pp. xiii-xiv)
Grinberg bases his ideas on the concepts of Freud and Melanie Klein. In the just quoted basic assumptions, one may consider some alternatives to his exclusive explanatory descriptions. Thus, one can conceive of depression as an affect; a character/personality organization; a reaction to stress where depressive withdrawal is a way of coping with the traumatic strain; an endogenous illness possibly having a biogenetic basis; or a reaction to life-threatening illness, for example, carcinoma of the pancreas. Mourning can be envisioned as an adaptive process to loss, which may be the loss of a significant object or a change, normative, catastrophic, or both. As Freud (1917) noted, normal mourning comes to a close without pathological consequences. There are, however, many degrees of severity of this mourning process. Changes in the i