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Symbolizing a Definitive Absence—A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Death and Dying*

Eckhard Frick

Since Freud’s seminal text ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (Freud 1917e [1915]), bereavement research reflects on the dilemma between continuing versus relinquishing bonds to deceased persons (Stroebe et al. 2010). Mourning is the process of symbolizing the loss, of making sense by facing the conflict between the absence of the lost object and the continuing presence of an emotional relationship to what is lost (Colman 2010). Furthermore, mourning is not limited to bereaved persons but also concerns dying persons and, in a broader sense, our whole symbolic life which is playful coping with a rhythm of absence and presence. Freud’s grandson Ernst (Freud 1920g/1940) repeated this rhythm of absence and presence with a reel of thread: ‘Fort—da’ (away—here). By repeating the turning point of this rhythm in both senses (absence ←•→ presence), Ernst acquires a symbolic self-empowerment, a playful trial of the unavoidable absence-and-presence-rhythms linked with his young life’s forthcoming losses. Death is the definitive turning point of human life. We do not know if we survive our death or how we do it. However, the dying and the bereaved persons’ mourning processes open a spiritual realm, connecting the individual grief to the archetypal mourning and its collective symbols. The individual grief and ideas of immortality may be an illusory cold comfort. Conversely, true and trustful consolation connects the individual and the archetypal mourning. The lifelong repetition of temporary wrenches as well as the definitive wrench give birth to living symbols.

In this essay I would like to show not only that mourning produces symbols—a special kind of presence following an object loss—but also that every symbol requires a work of mourning—working through a loss, an absence, a grief. A given bereavement situation is confronting us with very basic features of our mental, symbolic and spiritual life:

My experience leads me to conclude that, while it is true that the characteristic feature of normal mourning is the individual’s setting up the lost loved object inside himself, he is not doing so for the first time but, through the work of mourning, is reinstating that object as well as all his loved internal objects which he feels he has lost. He is therefore recovering what he had already attained in childhood.

(Klein 1940/1994: 113).

Our Whole Life Is a ‘Work of Mourning’

Everything starts with Freud’s seminal text ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (Freud 1917e [1915]) where we find in statu nascendi not only his (second) theory of mental structure (Freud 1923b/1940) but also later developments of post-Freudian thinking such as attachment theory, psychoanalysis of narcissism/ self-psychology, and object-relations theory. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ was originally part of metapsychology. Some other chapters seem to be destroyed by Freud himself (Bradbury 2001). It is true that many contemporary readers shrink back from his drive-psychology’s physicalist language. Freud himself admits that his energetic and economic terminology is not entirely satisfying. We must, consequently, reconstruct Freud’s thought using more recent authors who more or less refer to him. Freud describes the work of mourning as follows:

The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object . . . The task is now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up (eingestellt) and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it is accomplished.

Why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit, which is in the nature of a compromise, should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of mental economics. It is worth noting that this pain seems natural to us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.

(Trauer und Melancholie, 430)

The testing of reality ‘shows’ that the loved object no longer exists: This ‘showing’ is not absolute, it is, on the contrary, impeded by all forms of defences. Freud physicalistically speaks about the libido ‘bound to the object’: Reality-testing requires ‘that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object’ although we ‘never willingly abandon a libido-position’.

What about the libido and what about its binding to the object?

Let us read the short text ‘On Transience’ (Freud 1916a/1963) a remarkable ‘summer-walk through a smiling countryside’, published in wartime one year before ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (but actually written some months after it). Freud is ‘in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet’. The young poet was ‘disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction’. Freud anticipates what he will write about mourning and tells us:

But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such is mourning.

‘On Transience’.

Note that mourning in this text is not severance of attachment, but continuity of bonds. How can we distinguish the mere defence against the reality of loss and this desire of continuity?

In this text, Freud defines libido as Liebesfähigkeit (capacity to love). He presumes that we come to this life with a certain amount of narcissistic libido, i.e., libido turned towards the ego. When we withdraw libido from the ego and invest it in the objects those objects are somehow integrated in our ego. Conversely, after destruction or loss of objects, libido becomes free and returns to the ego.

I would like to highlight a double movement:

Our Whole Life Is a ‘Work of Mourning’

Now we have reconstructed a first and simple metapsychological model: Investment of libido in objects means that the ego loosens the narcissistic libido and that those objects become somehow part of the ego. Conversely, after destruction or loss of the objects and loss of the libido’s point of contact, narcissistic libido will be tightened up or reinvested in other objects.

Freud uses a special concept for the libido’s investing or ‘clinging’: Besetzung (occupation). The Standard Edition translates as ‘cathexis’. This nice Greek term is composed by hexis (having) and kata (under/according to). It is true that we hold tight whom or what we love, and that we grasp even with more energy when we are about to lose it.

Freud does not yet postulate a ‘death drive’. He considers a sexual drive in a broad sense, libido, which can ‘cathect’, or invest, in an ‘object’ (the site of satisfaction). The ego is a kind of reservoir of all libido, origin of cathexes to objects in the outside world as well as to representations of objects in the internal world. It is true that Freud’s early mourning theory understands ‘the loss of a love object as a temporary disruption of the mourner’s narcissism’ (Clewell 2004: 46). What he calls ‘ego’ is his theory of narcissism renamed ‘self’ by post-Freudian authors.

Now we may have a second look on the ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ quotation.

‘The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object.’

The object has been destroyed by death or another loss. Reality testing reminds this fact and commands the withdrawal of attachment against a resistance demanding a particular effort.

‘The task is now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind.’

Despite the knowledge of facts, libido is still clinging to the object (cathexis) and this ongoing cathexis is continued by the object’s mental presence. There is an inner conflict between reality testing and emotional ties. Its resolution requires time and energy.

‘Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up (eingestellt) and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it is accomplished.’

Remark that in this sentence every philosopher will discover a category mistake: cathexis (binding of libido), hyper-cathexis, and detachment are physical terms. Memory and hope, on the contrary, are mental terms. Slipping from one category to the other is philosophically uncool.

The work of mourning consists in singularizing, bringing up and intensifying (hyper-cathexis) of memories and hopes as a prerequisite of detachment. Paradoxically, the work of mourning is not a process of piecemeal fading away.

This paradoxical intensification is accompanied and expressed by the experience of pain:

Why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit, which is in the nature of a compromise, should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of mental economics. It is worth noting that this pain [Schmerzunlust] seems natural to us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.

Trauer und Melancholie.

Freud Describes ‘Identification’

a) In melancholia:

The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

Trauer und Melancholie.

b) In normal mourning:

Freud limits the term ‘identification’ to situations where the normal mourning remains unaccomplished. It is true, however, that we may call ‘identification’ the mental continuation of the lost object, the ‘permanent relationship between the representation of self and the representation of the lost object, the combination of an intrapsychic presence of that object, and the awareness of its objective permanent absence’ (Kernberg 2010: 610). Furthermore, in The Ego and the Id (Freud 1923b/1940), Freud will extent the melancholic identification to the ‘normal’ ego (Clewell 2004).

After this last crescendo of suffering, the work of mourning seems to be ‘completed’. But this is only one part of the story.

Let us see how psychoanalysis and attachment theory deal with Freud’s theory.

Volkan differentiates two aspects of the German term Trauer used by Freud: The painful grief reaction and the more silent mourning process. Trauerarbeit (grief work) in the first meaning of emotional disclosure and detachment requires that the bereaved ‘confront and express their feelings and reactions’ (Stroebe et al. 2005). Some authors think that the therapist should compel bereaved persons to express sadness ‘in the belief that the abreaction of suppressed affect is at the core of successful treatment’ (Hagman 2001). In empirical studies, there is little evidence that induced disclosure of emotions is effective in coping with bereavement (Stroebe et al. 2005).

‘Uncomplicated grieving may be seen as nature’s exercise in loss and restitution’ (Volkan 1971: 255). However:

The physical loss of a person or thing does not parallel the mental ‘burial’ of the mental representation . . . of the lost person or thing. Obviously the mourner possesses mental images of a person or thing before its loss. But after the loss, the mourner . . . turns his or her attention to such mental images and becomes preoccupied with them. If a mourning process is completed, for practical purposes, we make the mental representation of the lost person or thing ‘futureless’ (Tähkä 1984): The mental representation of the lost item is no longer utilized to respond to our wishes; it has no future. A young man stops fantasizing that a wife who had been dead for some time will give him sexual pleasure, for example. It can be said that we ‘bury’ the mental representation of a lost person or thing when we manage to make them futureless. During the mourning process mourners review, in a piecemeal fashion, hundreds of mental images of what has been lost and, in so doing, are able to keep aspects of the lost person’s or thing’s images within their own self-representation. This is possible due to mourners’ identification with the aspects of the mental representation of the lost item.

When such identifications are (unconsciously) selective and ‘healthy’, the mourning process is considered ‘normal’. The mourner, after going through the pain of grief and after spending considerable energy reviewing many mental images of the lost person or thing, ‘gains’ something from the experience. By assimilating the functions of a deceased person, the mourner can now perform such functions himself. A year or so after his father’s death, for example, a philandering young man becomes a serious industrialist like his dead father used to be.

How can we understand the mental images, the object representations? Volkan and Zintl (1993) coined the term ‘psychic double’ for every person who populates or once populated our world. This is a very understandable expression of what Melanie Klein calls ‘inner objects’. Every ‘new’ upcoming or happening bereavement challenges our experiences with good objects and may entail a regression towards more archaic, paranoid forms of relationship.

When someone important to us dies, the psychic double ‘remains hot’ or even intensifies due to the separation (Freud’s ‘hyper-cathexis’). ‘The work of mourning involves taking the heat out of the loss and cooling down, but not eliminating the psychic double,’ says Volkan.

Freud distinguishes normal mourning from melancholia, where the lost object’s shadow remains upon the ego, provoking troubles of self-esteem not observed in normal mourning. Melancholic identification means that the ego treats itself as if it was the object, with all the characteristics of hate and love. According to Volkan, we may distinguish normal mourning, melancholia and perennial mourning:

  1. ‘Normal’ mourning: After initial grief, mourners examine a host of images of the deceased. Within a year or so, they tame the influence of these ‘futureless’ images on their self-representations . . . A significant aspect is the mourner’s selective, unconscious identification with certain enriching functions of the lost object. This influences the mourner’s existing self-representation and modifies his/her sense of identity and ego functions, e.g. a young man who had been irresponsible before the loss of his father can become a serious businessman like the deceased.
  2. Depression (melancholia): If an adult had an ambivalent relationship with the deceased, he/she ends up identifying totally (Ritvo and Solnit, 1958) with the mental representation of the lost object, making ‘unhealthy, not enriching’ identifications with images of the deceased. The mourner wants, unconsciously, to destroy (hate) the lost object’s representation and feels guilty, whilst feeling obliged to hold on to (love) it because he/she still feels dependent on the representation of the lost object, as if it still has a ‘future’. The mourner may become suicidal due to the guilt and self-punishment arising from the wish to destroy the mental representation of the lost object.
  3. Perennial mourning: Some individuals are involved in psychological processes that lead them to postpone completion of their ‘normal’ mourning or prevent them from evolving melancholia . . . In a sense, these individuals put the deceased person’s mental representation in an envelope (an introject) and carry this in their minds. They have an illusion that the deceased’s images in this envelope can be brought back to life. However, if the envelope is never opened, the deceased stays ‘dead’ . . . When it appears that such individuals suffer hallucinations, they are not true psychotics, but perennial mourners (Volkan 2003).

Linking Objects ‘Freeze’ or Deblock the Mourning Process

Volkan found that perennial mourners often used symbolic items, ‘linking objects’, which stop the process of mourning at a certain point. This freezing and postponing may hinder the individual from accomplishing the process or, on the contrary, permit completing the work of mourning. Linking objects may be:

The personal possession of the deceased, e.g., a watch, usually needs repair. The mourner becomes preoccupied about this repair. The object remains, however, unrepaired. The gift or symbolic farewell note is the last object given before a fatal accident, or before being killed as a soldier. Something the deceased used to extend his/her senses or body functions: May be a camera or another optical instrument or a mobile phone. Again, it may be broken, waiting for repair. Realistic or symbolic representation of the deceased: a photograph, a video, a tape recording, a painting or a text. ‘Last-minute object’: ‘something at hand when the mourner learned of the death or saw the deceased’s body’. Finally, the mourner may create linking objects by painting or other representations (Volkan 2003).

Linking objects are a frozen form of symbols, proto-symbols which may develop in the sense of symbolization. They have an ‘eerie’ character, and there may be a ‘spiritual merging’ with the dead person, including the fear to be influenced by the dead person who may actually come back into the mourner’s life. Volkan distinguishes the highly symbolized linking object from Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ which creates the intermediate space in the infant’s development and from the fetish which is a rigid placeholder. Conversely, linking objects can initiate future mourning. In his ‘regrief therapy’ Volkan used linking objects for beginning the mourning process as if the loss had just happened. Consequently, possessing linking objects, is a double-edged sword as far as personal growth is concerned.

Furthermore, enlarging individual psychology, he described mourning and frozen mourning processes in societies such as ex-Yugoslavia, South Africa and in the US (Volkan 2007).

A collective linking object may be a ‘chosen trauma’ such as Serbian Prince Lazar’s death during the Battle of Kosovo (28 June 1389). In the approaches to the Serbs’ war with Bosnian Muslims in 1990—91 and again before the conflict with Kosovar Albanians in 1998, Slobodan Miloševič and his entourage ‘reactivated’ the Serbs’ chosen trauma in order to distinguish Serb and non-Serb identities in order to ‘legitimate’ Serb violence against non-Serbs.

As the six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo approached, the remains of leader captured and killed at the Battle of Kosovo, were exhumed. For a whole year before the atrocities began, the coffin travelled from one Serbian village to another, and at each stop a kind of funeral ceremony took place. This ‘tour’ created a time collapse. Serbs were primed to react as if Lazar had been killed just the day before, rather than six hundred years earlier. Feelings, perceptions and anxieties about the past event were condensed into feelings, perceptions and anxieties surrounding current events, especially economic and political uncertainty in the wake of Soviet communism’s decline and collapse. Since Lazar had been killed by Ottoman Muslims, present-day Bosnian Muslims—and later present-day Kosovar Albanians (also Muslims)—came to be seen as an extension of the Ottomans, giving the Serbian people, as a group, the ‘opportunity’ to exact revenge from the group that had humiliated their large group so many centuries before. In this context, many Serbs felt ‘entitled’ to rape and murder Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians (For further details, see: Volkan 1997, 1999.)

Consequently, a linking object is half-way between a non-symbolized and absurd beta-element and an alpha-element which is growing in a loving, understanding, containing relationship. Bion told us that such a helpful relationship metabolizes and detoxifies beta-elements.

The capacity to symbolize allows an individual to represent an experience mentally rather than concretely. In the aftermath of a trauma, painful and disturbing images, thoughts and feelings are often unable to be held in the mind in a way that distinguishes them from the actual reality of the event. They cannot be contained as memories. Instead, these thoughts and images become concrete, live flashbacks that typically intrude into consciousness as a literal re-experiencing of the event. If the mental capacity is flawed or impaired in this way, there is also often an intrusion of the flashback experience into the body. This intrusion can take the form of psychosomatic illness (Lemma and Levy, 2004).

Accordingly, a collective linking object such as the Serb ‘chosen trauma’ or an individual one, encompasses an ambivalent potential: it may provoke narcissistic identification, further trauma and violence, or, on the contrary, trigger the continuation of a ‘frozen’ mourning process.

Living Symbols Require a Work of Mourning

Symballein in Greek means to put or to throw together. When friends separated, they broke a bowl or a coin of money. When they met again (or their children), the joined pieces not only ‘signified’ unity, they made unity.

According to Jung, a symbol is more than a sign which may be explained, verbalized, decoded. Deciphering ‘kills’ a symbol which is ‘the best expression of a relatively unknown cause’, better than our explanations or verbalizations. The symbol is the joint of two (separated, opposed) realities, and it generates a third which is beyond the original opposition (‘transcendent’ function of the symbol). ‘Perhaps the central task of mourning is to make sense of the conflict between the absence of the lost object and the continuing presence of an emotional relationship to that which is lost’ (Colman 2010: 278).

My thesis is that every symbol requires an absence and, in a certain sense, a work of mourning, of sense and meaning-making. Our whole symbolic life which is playful coping with a rhythm of absence and presence. Freud’s grandson Ernst (Freud 1920g/1940) repeated this rhythm of absence and presence with a reel of thread: ‘Fort—da’ (away—here):

Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often no light task. He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ which, in the judgement of the mother (one that coincided with my own), was not an interjection but meant ‘go away’ (fort). I saw at last that this was a game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’ (fortsein) with them. One day, I made an observation that confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it, but he kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the side of his little draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then said his significant ‘o-o-o-oh’ and drew the reel by the string out of the cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there). This was, therefore, the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.

Jenseits des Lustprinzips.

By repeating the turning point of this rhythm in both senses (absence ←•→ presence), Ernst acquires a symbolic self-empowerment, a playful trial of the unavoidable absence-and-presence-rhythms linked with his young life’s forthcoming losses. According to Freud, his grandson’s game is for coping with powerlessness and passivity: passive in the first place, ‘overtaken by the experience’, he now ‘brings himself in as playing an active part, by repeating the experience as a game in spite of its unpleasing nature. This effort might be ascribed to the impulse to obtain the mastery of a situation (the power instinct)’. Freud adds another interpretation: The ‘gratification of an impulse of revenge suppressed in real life but directed against the mother for going away’: ‘Yes, you can go, I don’t want you. I am sending you away myself.’ Some years later, Ernst used to throw a toy on the floor and say, ‘Go to the war!’ It seems evident, that he is coping with his father’s absence as a soldier in World War I.

Freud’s grandson’s symbolic game may be interpreted as a tried mastery when facing the rhythm of presence and absence. Living symbols which produce libido, energy, as Jung says, are quite different from signs and proto-symbols in the sense of Volkan’s linking objects.

They come forth of a liberating ritual, a mourning which is at the same time accepting the loss and opening a space for transformation, for the ongoing game.

Jung’s distinction between a ‘killed’ or ‘dead’ symbol and a living one has an equivalent in Hanna Segal’s distinction between ‘symbolic equation’ and ‘symbolic representation’. When asking patient A why he stopped playing the violin, this young man suffering from schizophrenia replied with some violence, ‘Why, do you expect me to masturbate in public?’ Mr A had identified violin and penis in a concretistic manner. Conversely, ‘another patient, B, dreamed one night that he and a young girl were playing a violin duet. He had associations to fiddling, masturbating, etc.’ (Segal 1957/1981: 49). In distinction from A, B is able to distinguish violin and penis (symbolic representation).

Symbolic representations help us to cope with the loss of an (external) object. We learn that we do not possess it, that the mastery of the ‘o-o-o-oh’/’Da’ is limited. This acceptance of the uncontrollable external objects entail the possibility of an internal (symbolic) presence. ‘No breast—therefore a thought’ (Bion 1970/1975). Only when the infant can recognize the absence of the object she or he can either symbolize or think (Segal 1991; Colman 2010). There is a strong difference between lost objects (which can be symbolized, e.g., in a therapeutic relationship) and objects which are gone (nameless dread, according to Bion):

Since the restoration of lost objects is pre-eminently a symbolic process, this cannot be achieved if absence remains in the unthinkable state of being ‘gone’ where the absence of the object is coexistent with the absence of a mind in which it can be known. In Bion’s terms, there are only beta elements without a thinker to process them. This can only occur through the internalization of a container/contained apparatus which enables the development of alpha function and the formulation of mental contents into thoughts (Colman 2010: 291).

If mourning expresses the conflict between the absence of the lost object and the continuing presence of an emotional relationship a symbol is born—in the mourner’s mind, between analyst and patient, between conscious and unconscious:

Projective identifications are gradually withdrawn and the separateness of the subject from the object becomes more firmly maintained. With that comes a greater awareness of one’s own psychic reality and the difference between internal and external. In such a situation the function of symbolism gradually acquires another meaning. Symbols are needed to overcome the loss of the object which has been experienced and accepted, and to protect the object from one’s aggressiveness. A symbol is like a precipitate of the mourning for the object (Segal 1991: 40).

Spirituality

When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it is a beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides this horror at the extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual wound, which like a physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes heals, but always aches and shrinks at any external irritating touch . . . A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet heal completely only as the result of a vital force from within (Tolstoy, War and Peace, 15).

Kernberg resumes Freud’s vision of the accomplished mourning by the term ‘identification’ (with the lost object), while Freud reserves this term to the melancholic process and insists on the decathexis in normal mourning. Melanie Klein adds that normal mourning reawakens and resolves the depressive position in a process of reparation. Finally, Kernberg highlights the spiritual aspect of mourning. He proposes ‘a permanent relationship between the representation of self and the representation of the lost object, the combination of an intrapsychic presence of that object, and the awareness of its objective permanent absence’ (Kernberg 2010: 410). On the one hand, there is now no more forgiveness nor repair with the lost person. On the other hand, aspirations and values of the dead person may be experienced by the person in mourning as a mandate, a command: They become part of the mourner’s superego as ‘highly personalized relations with the lost object’ (Kernberg 2010: 410). Libidinal investments are ‘not a zero sum capacity’. On the contrary, ‘mourning interminably may become part of the increased capability for love and appreciation of life’ (614).

The expansion of moral values and ethical commitments related to the mandates that reflect the desires and aspirations of the person who died, whose life project was interrupted, are frequently a powerful stimulus to reparative action of the survivor providing a sense of purpose. They become, as mentioned before, ethical commands and aspired for ideals. Reparative processes, in short, expand into spiritual demands (Kernberg 2010: 613).

The danger of the unaccomplished, frozen mourning process is, as Volkan says, a defensive ‘spiritual merging’ between the mourning and the mourned person. However, when the reality of object loss is recognized, the power of the emotional and spiritual reality reflected in a permanent internalized relation with the lost object becomes an ‘absent presence’ as Kernberg quotes Sara Zac de Filc.

The irresistible urge for reunion, the fantasy and concern over life after death, the expanding moral universe related to the mandate all combine in the expression of powerful religious impulses, whether they take the form of adherence to an established religious belief system, or are constructed individually as a painful yet indispensable aspect of spiritual existence and survival.

(Kernberg 2010: 613).

Kernberg’s spiritual bond and its structural consequences have been described as a transformative process observed in securely attached mourners (Stroebe et al. 2010). The lost person is ‘resurrected’ in terms of ‘mentally represented legacy components (e.g., what would he have said, how would he have responded)’, enriching ‘those mental representations of the lost person’s legacy that carry substitute value’ (Boerner and Heckhausen 2003: 219).

The analyst’s role, his or her containing function during the mourning process, encompasses ‘the transference function of reinstating and maintaining that internalized relationship’ with the lost object, while ‘bringing it to life in the relation with the analyst’. According to Kernberg, this transference aspect reflects the double function of the mourning process—superego restructuring and maintaining the relationship (Kernberg 2010: 613).

Consolation?

In his criticism of religion, Freud often opposes scientific enlightenment and the soothing function of religion who feeds with empty promises, with hopes of a better world. This criticism basically concerns the illusion of narcissistic perfection and fulfilling of wishes (Westerink 2010). Is a true consolation conceivable, a consolation which encompasses the work of mourning, i.e., the acknowledgement of a given object-loss? The answer will depend on the general theory of mourning: Does it consist in severance of attachment and redemptive replacement, or is a continuity of bonds conceivable as Freud suggests in his dialogue with the silent as well as in a 1929 letter to Binswanger:

Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.

The Dual Process Model (Stroebe et al. 2010) endorses an ‘oscillation’ between loss-orientated and restoration-orientated coping. This orientation entails emotional and cognitive commitments during the mourning process which is never entirely accomplished but encompasses, as the Dual Process Model shows, a relocated presence of the absent, a transformation of mental representations. This is true for bereaved persons but also for other losses, especially for the dying person’s mourning called travail du trépas (transition work) (de M’ Uzan, 1976/1977).

De M’Uzan insists that we decipher the hastened death desire: ‘In fact, the dying person engages, under the terms of what I imagine like a kind of knowing of the species, in an ultimate relational experience. Whereas the bonds which attach him to the others are about to be finally severed, he is paradoxically raised by a powerful and somehow passionate movement.’ The ultimate relational experience engaged by the dying person is paradoxical: ‘Although the dying person’s links to others are about to be untied, he/she overinvests objects, as a last attempt to assimilate unresolved issues’ (Des Rosiers, 1999). Des Rosiers considers life as ‘between two deaths’: During the ‘first death’ (Leclaire, 1975; Racamier, 1992), during analysis or finally during the travail du trépas, the ‘wonderful baby’ is mourned. The dying process ‘can be seen as an attempt at an ultimate completion of the shift from narcissistic investment to object investment’ (Des Rosiers, 1999).

True consolation cannot be provided by dead things but by living objects. Symbolically charged things may, however, convey this relational bond and restoration:

‘The function of gravestones, memorial monuments, pictures and photographs and works of art symbolically representing the lost person derive their consoling function from the assurance that the dead person is still out there, somewhere, in the external world’ (Kernberg 2010: 614).

True and trustful consolation connects the individual and the archetypal mourning, deuil originaire (Racamier 1992). This archetypal layer is originally represented to us by the mother as first incarnation of world and Self (Neumann 1955) and transcends the narrow borders of our individual ego. The intensity of mourning corresponds, as a matter of fact, to the intensity of loving attachment bonds. Paradoxically, a secure ‘inner working model’ does not entail a ‘clinging’ continuity of bonds, but an adaptive mentalizing capacity, corresponding to early experiences of coping with separation. What is true on the individual level also applies to the level of collective memory: Not the compulsive repetition of grief-signs but the work of memory transforms and heals bereaving experiences.

When we revive the infantile depressive position we do not only revive an individual experience but also a collective one:

The manic-depressive and the person who fails in the work of mourning . . . have this in common, that they have been unable in early childhood to establish their internal ‘good’ objects and to feel secure in their inner world. They have never really overcome the infantile depressive position. In normal mourning, however, the early depressive position, which has become revived through the loss of the loved object, becomes modified again, and is overcome by methods similar to those used by the ego in childhood. The individual is reinstating his actually lost loved object; but he is also at the same time re-establishing inside himself his first loved objects—ultimately the ‘good’ parents—whom, when the actual loss occurred, he felt in danger of losing as well. It is by reinstating inside himself the ‘good’ parents as well as the recently lost person, and by rebuilding his inner world, which was disintegrated and in danger, that he overcomes his grief, regains security, and achieves true harmony and peace (Klein 1940/1994: 120).

Volkan’s studies show that freezing of mourning processes may occur at a national or collective level. Collective ‘linking objects’ are as much an obstacle to accomplished mourning as a starting point for re-grieving and new libido, new capacity of love.

As in the classical Greek tragedy, true consolation does not consist in a narcissistic identification with my personal ego-ideal. True cathartic consolation is depersonalized, links my destiny to the hero’s destiny who incarnates the human condition. This ‘desire-cathexis’, according to Freud part of the mourning process, connects personal and archetypal mourning.

We have seen, that mourning deals with an ‘absent presence’ which may be expressed in religious symbols. Christianity is, according to Michel de Certeau, ‘a lost-body discourse’: ‘Christianity founded a discourse (the evangelical Logos) which offers “consolation” for the loss of the body’ (Certeau 1986: 112). In the context of his study about Jean-Joseph Surin, a 17th century mystic, Certeau affirms that the name (Jesus Christ) is a substitute for his lost body, for the empty tomb. The name is the origin of another body, the church, and of the biblical text (Certeau 1979). The experience of Pentecost requires the lost body’s absence, the original spiritual experience. The early Christian texts, especially St John and St Paul, call the Holy Spirit ‘parakletos’: helper, advocate, consoler, comforter (facing an absence).

What is beyond death may be called ‘O’ according to Bion:

‘O’ . . . stands for the absolute truth in and of any object; it is assumed that this cannot be known by any human being . . . its presence can be recognized and felt, but it cannot be known. It is [however] possible to be at one with it.

That it exists is an essential postulate of science, but it cannot be scientifically discovered. No psychoanalytic discovery is possible without recognition of its existence, at-one-ment with it and evolution.

The religious mystics have probably approximated most closely to expression of experience of it . . . Its existence is as essential to science as to religion. Conversely, the scientific approach is as essential to religion as it is to science. (Bion 1970/1975: 30).

What Bion calls ‘Faith-in-O’ is a non-religious scientific state of mind, in spite of his religious allusions, especially to Christian and Jewish mystics. At-one-ment is Bion’s expression of a symbol which produces reconciliation between presence and absence.