Transcending bitterness and early paternal loss through mourning and forgiveness

This paper provides an in-depth account of a clinical path to forgiveness following a complicated, delayed mourning of an early loss by a man now entering old age. The search for mourning and forgiveness in light of extreme bitterness in advancing age is highlighted. Despite the intimate connection between mourning and forgiveness, this paper attempts to highlight important differences in their dynamics and psychological aims. Forgiveness is conceived as work, unconsciously motivated, to safeguard and complement the psychological gains of mourning. The distinct features of forgiveness facilitating psychic reorganization, as well as the adaptive function of refusal to forgive as a defense against melancholia, are discussed. The paper concludes that in this case, the motivation for forgiveness was to repair a powerful narcissistic injury.     

A model of mourning: change in schemas of self and other

The mourning process may serve an evolutionary purpose, one that has allowed maximum survival characteristics. By passage through the phases of grief, the bereaved person prepares to make new commitments to others and to accept new personal roles. This passage involves an unconscious change in mental structures of meanings about the self and other people. This paper examines mourning in terms of such person schemas.     

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.     

‘The child's past in the adult's present’: The trauma of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944)

This study deals with the individual and collective memory of Leningrad Siege survivors who experienced mass and prolonged wartime trauma during childhood (1941–44). While much has been published about the Siege, there has to date been no investigation by psychologists into the effects of extreme deprivation on Siege victims apart from one pilot study (Gulina et al., 2005). This study is still underway. Interviews with 80 participants (68 female and 12 male) are analysed and discussed here. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and content analysis are utilized. Unpublished archival writings by children caught in the Siege have been analysed. The principal method of interpretation is based on a psychoanalytic understanding of child development, mourning and the metabolizing of traumatic experience. The subjective meaning of the Siege experience to individual children is considered     

Anna Freud and the Holocaust: Mourning and survival guilt

This article explores the period of Anna Freud's life after she was informed of the deaths of her aunts in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Understanding of this period may be enhanced by consideration of the role of the Holocaust in her complicated mourning process. A series of her dreams is re‐examined from the point of view of survivor guilt and the complicated mourning of her father in the context of the Holocaust. It is argued that unconscious reproaches against her father led to an identification with him that included his ‘decision’ to leave his sisters in Vienna. Survivor guilt in relation to her aunts’ murders is seen as one of the complicating factors in the mourning process. In addition the article discusses the possible role of this period, particularly her work with child concentration camp survivors, in her post‐war writing. The noted duality in her work between innovation and conservatism is explored in terms of an outcome of the mourning process of this period. It is argued that her views on mourning, trauma, attachment, and the widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis were influenced by the outcome of her mourning process. Finally, an irony is noted in the fact that her attitude about altruism never changed despite the role of the altruism of others in her rescue from the Nazis.     

The capacity to tell a joke: Reflections from work with Asperger children

The capacity to tell a joke is a highly complex interpersonal event that depends upon the maturation of certain developmental achievements which are absent or stunted in children with Asperger's Syndrome. These include the ability to know another's mind, a sense of interpersonal timing and, most notably, a capacity for abstract thinking. The author discusses Freud's ( 1905 ) notion of joke‐work, which is akin to dream‐work, both of which are pathways to forming mental representations. Freud considered joke‐work as a mental activity that operated on the verbal level and the author examines the preverbal dimensions that are rooted in the earliest mother/infant interactions. An extended case discussion of the psychoanalytic treatment of an Asperger boy is offered to illustrate these points and to demonstrate the activity of joke‐work as a means of building mental representations.     

Brief group psychotherapy for the spousally bereaved: a controlled study.

A consecutive sample of mid- and late-life bereaved spouses were randomly assigned to treatment and no-treatment groups. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) that brief group psychotherapy during the early stages of loss would facilitate adjustment assessed by measures of mental health, positive psychological states, social role, and mourning; and (2) that positive effects would be maximized for subjects who were more distressed psychologically. Although group participants, compared with untreated controls, did over 1 year show modest improvement on role functioning and positive psychological states, overall the study failed to find substantial support for the two major hypotheses. Both experimental and control groups showed improvement over the year, particularly on measures of mental health and mourning. Differential benefit was not observed for the high-risk group.     

Twelfth Annual Conference Henry Hudson Hotel 353 West 57th Street New York,N. Y.

A consecutive sample of mid- and late-life bereaved spouses were randomly assigned to treatment and no-treatment groups. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) that brief group psychotherapy during the early stages of loss would facilitate adjustment assessed by measures of mental health, positive psychological states, social role, and mourning; and (2) that positive effects would be maximized for subjects who were more distressed psychologically. Although group participants, compared with untreated controls, did over 1 year show modest improvement on role functioning and positive psychological states, overall the study failed to find substantial support for the two major hypotheses. Both experimental and control groups showed improvement over the year, particularly on measures of mental health and mourning. Differential benefit was not observed for the high-risk group.     

The Man Who Could Not Cry and the Psychoanalyst Who Could: Mutual Healing in the Maternal Transference/Countertransference

This is a clinical/theoretical study of mutual healing in the maternal transference/countertransference. Therapist and patient began their work when each was in extreme mourning. I detail sensory, affective transactions between them that proved transformative. I deem these basic to the healing that was unusually rapid. It broke through the patient's dissociation, and the therapist's sorrow. I note that the treatment modalities were similar to those essential to mother/infant bonding. I connect the treatment's transformative effects with those discovered through infant research and studies with the functioning magnetic resonance imagery test (fMRI). All three of these modes of interpersonal study-psychotherapy, infant, and fMRI research-exhibit mind/body imprinting of the mother/infant deeply connected experience.     

The lost cause of mourning

This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, that which assumes that suffering the death of a loved one means accommodating oneself to an absence where there was previously a presence. On the contrary, says Lacan, part of what is most deeply to be mourned is the lack in the Other around which the love relation was constructed. The paper concludes by asking to what extent Lacan’s account of mourning should be distinguished from those of both Hegel and Freud.     

Letting go: some thoughts about termination

Termination of analysis is discussed from three perspectives. First, considered as a vicissitude of the analytic relationship, termination contains essential elements of the psychoanalytic process itself. Cycles of attachment, loss, mourning, and internalization mark moments in, as well as overviews of, every analysis from its beginning to well past its termination. Second, Freud's approach to the subject of termination is explored and widened, with an emphasis on its relation to mourning and on the depth and permanence of analytic transference--two dimensions relatively neglected by Freud, perhaps for personal reasons. Finally, clinical issues are presented that are meaningful to the author in his work with analysands, including his work as a training analyst.     

Role of psychocultural factors in the adjustment of Soviet Jewish refugees: Applying Kleinian theory of mourning

The purpose of this paper is to show how failures of adjustment of Soviet refugees to America are to a great degree determined by their difficulties in mourning. The author argues that due to such difficulties, Soviet refugees may get fixated sometimes for long periods of time at different stages of the mourning process. Such fixations may be the causes for peculiar types of behavior, frequently exhibited by these refugees in America and attributed by various authors to their psychocultural characteristics. Melanie Klein's analysis of mourning and its relationship to manic depressive states is applied to understand the mourning process in this population. The author shows that difficulties in the mourning process experienced by Soviet refugees may be connected with the culturally acquired inhibitions of mourning. Such inhibitions are analyzed from a family, historical and cultural perspective.     

The extreme male brain theory of autism

The key mental domains in which sex differences have traditionally been studied are verbal and spatial abilities. In this article I suggest that two neglected dimensions for understanding human sex differences are 'empathising' and 'systemising'. The male brain is a defined psychometrically as those individuals in whom systemising is significantly better than empathising, and the female brain is defined as the opposite cognitive profile. Using these definitions, autism can be considered as an extreme of the normal male profile. There is increasing psychological evidence for the extreme male brain theory of autism.     

MOURNING IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC SITUATION AND IN SHAKESPEARE'S THE TEMPEST

Recognizing that mourning builds psychic structure, the author highlights the ubiquitous and essential nature of mourning in the psychoanalytic situation. Reality testing is intimately connected to mourning and is the warp on which psychic structure is woven in the analytic situation. Reality testing necessarily involves opportunities for mourning and thus will be present in every analytic hour. The confrontation with reality is the basis for all processes of mourning, or for creating defenses against this painful experience. The author views mourning as fundamentally a transformational process, and Shakespeare's The Tempest is used to illustrate this aspect of mourning.     

The missing tombstone: reflections on mourning and creativity

There are differences as well as similarities between mourning occurring after the loss of a single individual under ordinary civilized conditions, and mourning after multiple losses under traumatic conditions. A brief review of the psychoanalytic theory of mourning articulated by Freud in 1917 and modified in the 1960s is followed by an equally brief review of the relationship between artistic creativity and mourning. Because survivors of major disasters who suffer multiple losses need time to recover before they can engage the emotionally demanding task of mourning, the mourning process in these cases is frequently delayed. "Memorial spaces" appear to facilitate delayed mourning because such spaces are responsive to a deeply felt need by survivors of major tragedies to articulate what they experience as unspeakable and unshareable. The memories and the pain associated with them are then welcome because mourning is not about forgetting; mourning is about remembering, a process that may take a lifetime.     

Seduction,date rape,and aborted surrender

Abstract

This paper clarifies the dual-layered nature of the “demon lover complex,” with its background of both pre-Oedipal trauma and Oedipal-level desire. It draws on an object relations understanding of the unconscious and dissociated addiction to an internal demon object that has derivations in the personalities of the actual parents, and in the internalization of these parents. The dramatic case of early trauma compounded by adult date rape trauma serves to illustrate how a “developmental mourning process” in treatment can resolve such trauma. It also illustrates how reparation with the mother that partially heals pre-Oedipal trauma cannot immunize anyone against Oedipal-level attractions to a “demon lover” father, as represented in a displacement, resulting in victimized behavior, and in an aborted surrender to heterosexual desire. However, this victimization can be resolved, as seen in the clinical illustration, when the psychoanalyst has an understanding of the mourning process in developmental terms, working with a natural interaction between mourning and transference evolutions in treatment. The case also demonstrates the transitional object role of the psychoanalyst who is involved with the healing of pre-Oedipal trauma through mourning.     

A suicide in an online mental health support group: reactions of the group members, administrative responses, and recommendations.

Suicides in online mental health support groups are inevitable. This case report of such a suicide describes the responses of the group members and the moderator and makes recommendations. Members of a large, public, mental health message board supported each other, and the moderator, a mental health professional, managed the milieu. A member joined in February 2001 and killed herself in April 2002. The initial response of the members was grief. The moderator attempted to minimize suicide contagion by not making any special announcements and to facilitate mourning by starting a memorial thread. There were no reports of self-injury in response to the suicide, and the online ventilation of grief may in fact have had some preventative effect. One member went to the funeral, and gradually, the group moved on. The moderator later implemented a memorial page. The responses of online groups to suicide may, like those of real-life groups, have resuscitation, rehabilitation, and renewal phases. Diffusion of dependency, a searchable archive, and threaded, asynchronous discussion may facilitate mourning, but anonymity may increase vulnerability to false reports. A thread started in memory of a deceased member may function like a virtual memorial service. A memorial page may function like a virtual cemetery. Preliminary recommendations can be made regarding suicide prevention and responding to suicide in moderated online mental health support groups.     

Incidence of Savant Syndrome in Finland

The general incidence of Savant Syndrome was assessed in Finland. First, a survey was made of all 583 facilities which served people with mental retardation. Second, letters asking for information regarding people with Savant Syndrome were published in two key Finnish journals of the field. We received reports of 45 cases of Savant Syndrome. This makes an incidence rate of 1.4 per 1,000 people with mental retardation. The most common form of exceptional skills was calendar calculation, followed by feats of memory.     

Concurrent Grandparent Death and Birth of Schizophrenic Offspring: An Intriguing Finding

The finding, in the following study, of grandparent death within ± two years of birth of 41 per cent of schizophrenics (N= 70 ), a rate significantly higher than that in psychiatric (N= 45 ) and normal (N= 25 ) control groups, raises the possibility that this family stress factor may contribute to the development of schizophrenia. The implications are considered regarding the likelihood that the concurrent stresses of the death and the birth, two major events in the family life cycle, could confound and impede mourning and parenting processes. Two hypotheses are suggested: (a) that a bereaved parent may be emotionally unavailable to spouse and infant, and (b) that attention to the child may block mourning and absorb painful feelings, with the child assuming a special replacement role. The dysfunctional potential is related to other interacting variables, including biological factors, mourning resolution, and the family system. Further study is called for.     

Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome.

Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome was first described in 1957 but only in 1963 as a distinguishable type of moderate mental retardation. The cause is still unknown although some type of genetic origin is possible. No consistent chromosomal abnormality has been demonstrated, the chromosomal analysis is normal, and cases are generally not considered hereditary. The recurrent risk for siblings is approximately 0.1% but may be as high as 50% for offspring of patients with the syndrome. The Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome is not at present detectable before birth and is evenly found in both males and females. The syndrome was thought to be rare but an increase in the number of reported cases each year suggests it is not as rare as estimated. It is thought to occur in about 1 in 300,000 births, and since it has become readily identifiable, more than 400 cases have been reported worldwide.