VII. On Being Unable to Weep*

Failure to weep, respiratory catarrh, oedema and urinary retention are some of the disturbances of body fluid function observed in patients when there is interference with mourning. The writings of Bion are evocative in this psychosomatic field. He has suggested a ‘protomental system’ in which physical and mental are undifferentiated, until there is experienced an object capable of containing and modulating anxiety. He has suggested the definition, ‘shock’: the seeping away of sanity into his own mental tissues', and remarked on the problems attending the change at birth from a watery to gaseous medium.

A depressed woman came to analysis, complaining that she was unable to remember anything good about her mother. When she was fifteen her mother had died of a stroke, but she had not wept at the funeral, unlike the rest of her family, and she had been ashamed. At a time of crisis she referred in a dream to a child threatened with whooping cough, and soon after she herself fell ill with a similar cough.

The material from her analysis which follows is considered with the following conjecture in mind: in the infant the primitive manifestation of unbearable feeling is partly somatic, and body fluid caught up in emotional turbulence seeps from the walls of the containing systems, or fails to excrete physiologically, until the experience of a good external object modifies the ‘protomental system’.

The patient was single, in her thirties and a teacher. Her parents were committed to their professions and middle-aged when they met and married. Their first baby was stillborn in primitive conditions abroad. They were said to be guilty about unheeded obstetric advice, and the mother's puerperal depression persisted beyond the birth of my patient who was delivered in the safety of an obstetric unit, but far distant from home, one year later. Within a few weeks of the confinement, mother and baby returned home, a difficult journey lasting several weeks by sea and overland.

After two ye