Mourning and the symbolic process

Abstract: This paper describes the analysis of a patient whose difficulty symbolizing absence had prevented her from being able to mourn the loss of her father in her adolescence. Through a series of symbolic enactments and synchronistic events, she was eventually able to carry out a mourning ritual that enabled her to lay her father to rest. Some implications for symbolization are discussed, developing Segal's view of symbol formation as reparation: symbols are embedded in a context of communication and can only develop in the context of a relationship; they represent relationships as well as objects; and they are emergent in the sense that they exist within a complex web of interactive, multiple meaning and cannot be reduced back to any one object that they represent.     

Parental Mourning and Children's Behavior

This article alerts professionals to sibling death as a possible reason for behaviors exhibited by young clients. Aside from their own grief, children are affected by parental mourning over a child's death and accompanying changes in the family environment. Children show their distress in a variety of behaviors, some of which appear to be unrelated to the loss. Four areas of concern are presented with case illustrations: cognitive distortions, reactions to parents' distress and preoccupation with the loss, being a replacement child, and effects of parents' failure to work through their grief. Suggestions for helping children and parents include using a genogram for identifying loss, helping the family talk about the death, and providing a support group for children.     

Mourning the Dead,Following the Living

In this paper I take up the ambivalence we rightly feel toward leaders by examining the relationship between charismatic authority and moral exemplarity. Drawing on the social theory of Max Weber, and in dialogue with a case study of an anti‐militarism movement called the SOA (School of Americas) Watch, I demonstrate that through a “politics of sacrifice” leaders synchronize their own stories with those of communally recognized exemplars and act in ways that evidence a solidarity in the suffering of those exemplars thereby generating their charismatic authority. While performing crucial strategic, motivational, and pedagogical roles, this charisma also introduces problematic temptations to authoritarianism that short‐circuit the practical reasoning that exemplars supposedly help to form. In the end this leaves our sense of ambivalence intact. What is needed, I argue, are practices of critique that reopen the distance between leader and follower and thus allow the possibility of practical reason.     

Mourning analysis: the post-termination phase

One hundred twenty-one analytic candidates who had completed training analysis responded to a survey about their post-termination experience. Seventy-six percent of respondents experienced a mourning process that lasted on average between six months and a year, while 24 per cent experienced no discernible sense of painful loss. Twenty candidates were interviewed to obtain a deeper understanding of the mourning process that follows analysis. During the post-termination phase, the analysand's self-analytic capacity is tested in the struggle to contain and understand feelings about the loss of the analyst, as well as transference reactions triggered by that loss. After a "good-enough analysis," the analysand internalizes not only the analyst's functions and attitudes toward him or her, but also a sustaining, positive internal image of the analyst. Four cases illustrate unexpected difficulties that may emerge during the post-termination phase when the loss of the analyst is experienced as a repetition of earlier, traumatic losses or as a rupture of an unanalyzed, selfobject transference.     

Suicide,Loss, and Mourning

ABSTRACT: The intensive treatment of six suicidal patients has been used to explore the relationships among object loss, the mourning process, and suicide. These relationships may be condensed in two propositions: (a) suicidal behavior stems from an arrested grief reaction in which the subject is unable to complete the process of mourning for a lost object; and (b) the suicide's pathological loss reaction is brought about by developmental defects, primarily deficiencies in self-love and individuation. The suicidal subject's mournïng reaction is arrested in one or more of the first three stages of grief: shock, protest, or detachment from the lost object.     

法国著名哲学家雅克·德里达逝世

法国哲学家德里达逝世了.在得知这一消息后,正在中国访问的法国总统希拉克向媒体表示:德里达是当代法国最重要的哲学家之一,他的思想深刻影响了法国今天的知识界.     

悼念王玖兴教授

那是 1980年的事情 ,其时文化大革命结束不久。中国社会科学院第一次派出他们的教授到伟大的理念论哲学的家乡———德国 ,这位教授就是王玖兴先生。王先生首先到美茵茨 ,以便了解康德研究的状况 ;然后再从美茵茨到慕尼黑。我与他约好 ,我在火车站接他 ,我手持一本红书在胸前 ,好让他能够认出我。我猜想 ,他会穿一身当时非常流行的蓝色制服。火车进站了 ,在众多的旅客中有一位中国先生向我走来 ,但他穿的却是一件欧洲式样的黑色大衣。他认出我来 ,并且笑着说 ,“你就像一个中共党员”。这样 ,我从一开始就对他抱有特别好感 ,我觉得 ,他对我…     

Mourning is a family affair

Mourning is a process of social disengagement. In our modern society, however, the influence of social and religious institutions on the process of mourning has significantly diminished and been partially replaced by mental health clinics. Given the latter's penchant for the intrapsychic view, the perspective on mourning has become reduced to the individual. These trends are clearly reflected in a review of current literature and research on mourning. This paper proposes an interactional, systemic view of mourning through the analysis of two different families. Findings indicate that despite contextual differences between these two families, some basic commonalities render generalizations possible: (a) The selection of the identified patient is not coincidental to the stage of the family life cycle and to the role of the deceased member in the system. (b) Although death affects each individual differently, depending upon his or her relationship with the deceased, it continues to influence all family relations with equal powers. (c) Nonresolution of mourning permits a ghost to become an integral member of the family system. Examination of the treatment process demonstrates that a systemic approach is effective, even when individuals are interviewed alone.     

Social Trauma,Nostalgia and Mourning in the Immigration Experience

Immigration and exile can qualify as social traumas. The individual is deprived of a holding, secure environment in which to continue their life. The process of mourning is a necessary step to connect with “going on being.” Another psychic experience in migration is nostalgia; it helps the immigrant defend against the aggression resulting from current frustrations. The feeling of nostalgia can also be used to protect the ego from inadequacy. The complex components of nostalgia come from positive ones such as joy and gratitude connected with sadness about the associated loss of security, familiarity, and historical continuity. At other times, nostalgia cannot evolve, particularly in forced migration or exile. In this case, the individual enters a depressed state with accompanying feelings of self-pity, resentment, envy, and guilt, which prevents the mourning process from developing. To deal with these painful experiences, the person resorts to linking objects or linking phenomena that help them continue having contact with the past, while adjusting to their new environment.

     

Mourning Religion: A Response

Mourning Religion is a brilliant collection of essays responding both to Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” and Peter Homans’ assertion that the academic study of religion represents a creative expression of mourning the loss of religion in secular (western) society. This essay poses questions concerning the role of theology as a mode of analysis; Ricoeur’s concept of “second naiveté” in relation to disillusionment and religion; Celia Brickman’s reflections on globalization, marginalization, and a shift in psychological language from “primitivity” to “vulnerability”; the role of the body in the work of religious studies; melancholia as “re-membering” amid multiplicity and fragmentation; and mourning as protest and resistance. The essay concludes with a reflection on ambiguity and transcendence in dialogue with Freud’s essay “On Transience.”     

The Phenomenology of Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning

Loss, understood as a process of bereavement, grief, and mourning, most immediately affects our bodily experience in our world, known in the phenomenological tradition as our lived world. Unlike Cartesian conceptions of the body as a self-contained entity, encapsulated within the skin, our bodying forth, as articulated in the discourse of Merleau-Ponty, and more recently Drew Leder, entails various manifestations of lived experience. These reflections on miscarriage loss, understood through the notions of Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic structure of flesh, and Drew Leder's recessive, ecstatic, and dys-appearing body, provides the possibility for a phenomenology of lived loss.     

The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis and the Mourning of American Catholic Innocence

The passionate response of many American Catholics to the clergy sex abuse crisis is an expression not only of legitimate anger over the sexual abuse of children and young people by Roman Catholic priests but also of resistance to mourning the significant losses post-immigrant American Catholics sustained in the last third of the twentieth century.

Men,Warriorism, and Mourning: the Development of Unconventional Warriors

In this article, I consider the interrelation between the warrior ethos, warriorism, and mourning. More specifically, the question I seek to answer is how a young man moves from warriorism—an uncritical acceptance of warrior ethos—to being an unconventional warrior who, while remaining attached to the warrior ethos, is critical toward a government that uses its military to further the aims of political and economic elites. I rely on psychology of religion perspectives to understand the warrior ethos and warriorism because they have many parallels to religion. In addition, I find Nathan Carlin’s discussion of religious mourning helpful in framing this process of change. Finally, to illustrate my claims, I discuss the life of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler.