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The outgrowth of a grief experienced and observed, this interdisciplinary paper is an analytic study of the anatomy of adult bereavement during the first year of loss. After a review of the literature, tracing changes underlying psychoanalytic models of mourning since 1917, it proposes a new, multiperspectival approach in a four-stage model of mature bereavement.
Mourning is understood as a complex, multidimensional, and multidetermined process, reviving prior losses and separations, necessitating a fully differentiated psychic structure, and considerable ego strength for its optimal completion. The unity of this complete passage is best understood by looking closely at the shifting constellations of its multidimensional tasks, during each of its stages, in relation to each other, and to the whole.
Far from a severance or “decathecting” of the bond with the deceased, however, its painful travail consists in redrawing
Dr. Aragno is affiliated with the Washington Square Institute and the Postgraduate Center, New York City. She is in private practice as a psychoanalyst.
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Second Joint International Conference, “Deaths and Endings; Finality, Transformations, New Beginnings,” Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, July 26-28, 2002.
the boundaries of a libidinal membrane that was expanded to include a relationship in sensory reality and reconfiguring it symbolically, on an inner plane, thereby transforming while preserving the cherished dialogue, within.
In appreciating the adaptive value of meaning reconstruction through remembering, symbolization, and narratization, the paper concludes with an exploration of the conscious forms and unconscious dimensions of transcending loss through internalization, and the laborious phases of the processes that accomplish this.