Mourning, Trauma, and Working Through

The concept of working through has evolved since Freud's (1914) original ideas in “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” It has been dealt with from various perspectives including drive, ego psychology, object relations, interpersonal, and Kohution theories. I will attempt to address Freud's early concept of working through in a rather new way, condensing the ideas of instinct, object relations, affect theory, and trauma in a rather totalizing way. It is a sort of condensation of early Freud with more recent thought in relation to working through. Succinctly, the aim of this article is to present the idea that what we call working through is a mourning of trauma that resurfaces in the transference, that involves more than simply a decathexis of libido from an early bad object experience or trauma, but also a qualitative transformation of self through a detoxification of negative objects and affects. Finally, this mourning process can only take place through the gradual implementation of affect regulation, affect differentiation, and cognitive expansion. These processes are discussed in detail.

There arrives a time in analysis, after much groundwork has been laid with a particular issue or conflict, when patients seem to hold tenaciously to their old ways, perhaps tied not only to self-defeating behavior and attitudes but also to persecutory or abandoning objects of some sort. They seem afraid, somehow, that these objects, often externalized onto the therapist in the transference, will punish or seek revenge for any progress, individuation, or the seeking of pleasure or success. Pointing this out again and again at times does not seem enough to effect change. This is where working through, the final phase of psychoanalytic change, is required. In my estimation, the quality of being “stuck” is the result of a tenacious instinctual tie in the