Libido Adhesiveness and Working through during Pathological Mourning

Freud referred to the process of working through as a complex set of steps taken during the analytical process, whereby resistances are overcome and insight is achieved, through the use of interpretation. Freud also described the “resistance of the unconscious” as the force that will oppose the possibility of working through because, as he says, “even after the ego has decided to relinquish its resistances it still has difficulty in undoing the repression.” (1926)

The “resistance of the unconscious” is one of the five resistances described by Freud, together with the resistance of secondary gain, need for punishment, transferences and repression itself. The resistance of the unconscious, is a consequence of the instinct' compulsive tendency to repeat and is responsible for the tenacity with which the ego clings to its primitive cathexis, a tenacity Freud called the “adhesiveness of the libido”. In 1916, in his introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, he referred to this “adhesive” quality of the libido as “the tenacity with which the libido adheres to particular trends and objects that makes its appearance as an independent factor, varying from individuals, whose determinants are quite unknown to us, but whose significance for the aetiology of the neurosis we shall certainly no longer underestimate.”

Finally, in “Analysis terminable and interminable” (1937), Freud referred to such a resistance as a “field of enquiry … still bewilderingly strange and insufficiently explored.” “We come across people, for instance,”—he states—“to whom we should be inclined to attribute a special ‘adhesiveness of libido’… We are, it is true, prepared to find in analysis a certain amount of psychical inertias … We have called this behaviour, perhaps not quite correctly, ‘resistance from the Id.’ But with these patients I