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Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard
To see plainly or record truly …
The slant alters. I can't see the old contours. It's a larger world
Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on the ridge.
Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of spring?
A hard question and worth talking a whole night on. But with whom?
Of whom now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death
Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless, oh unless it were you?
Development necessarily is a story about the movement from one to two, from merger to separation, about emergence from a matrix into a free-standing structure, ground to figure, and back again. Like so many manifestations of psychopathology, anaclitic depression is a specific case of impairment in the process of movement from union to separation, probably taking place early in psychic development, and appears to be primarily a problem in attachment and separation.
Paradoxically, in order for the second being to hatch from its union with the first entity, a prerequisite seems to exist for a “sufficient” (not to suggest quantitative) degree or necessary quality of oneness, of union, or of attachment in the first place. Whether the period of union might be called autistic, symbiotic, oral-receptive, or primary narcissistic omnipotence (Winnicott), a sufficient relationship with the (psychological) egg environment — the “container,”