CHAPTER 15

In an earlier paper (Kernberg 2010), I pointed to some aspects of the mourning process that in my view had not been considered sufficiently in the literature. I proposed that mourning is a permanent process, with profound impact on the structures of the mind, on object relations in general, and on the capacity for deepening the understanding of subjective experiences of self and others. I suggested that the mourning process culminates in the consolidation of a permanent relationship with the lost object while still internalizing some aspect of the object’s characteristics as part of the self experience. This development points to the double process of identification: the incorporation of aspects of the lost object into the self and the setting up of a permanent dyadic relation of a representation of self with the representation of the lost object. This development within the ego coincides with new developments within the ego ideal, modifying superego functions in general, in the context of the internalization of the life project of the lost object—the identification within one’s own ego ideal with what the lost object would have wished to achieve in life, and what the person whose death is mourned would have said or done, reacted to or felt, expected himself or herself to achieve, and hoped for the mourner to achieve. The organization of internalized value systems, the integration of the mature superego, is thus modified and enriched.

Still, the mourning process would continue as repeated pain over the loss, with the lost object becoming a permanent painful “absent presence,” and connected with this experience, the reactivation of guilt feelings over not having fully appreciated the lost object during life and guilt feelings over having failed the loved one while they were alive. The more ambivalent the past relation with the object, the more painful are such guilt feelings, to the extent that pathological mourning may be characterized by significant pathology. In this latter case, the despair over the impossibility to repair real or fantasied guilt is reflected in depressive symptomatology, resulting in the possibility of suicidal wishes as the expression of the wish to expiate deep guilt feelings. Implicit dynamics may involve fantasies that self-elimination would permit the good parts of the self to survive, with the simultaneous destruction of all the bad parts of the self reflecting the negative feelings, including hatred of the lost object and the related unconscious introjection of the hated part of the object as part of the self. Under extreme circumstances, the despair over the permanent nature of the loss coincides with the condemnation symbolized by the words inscribed over Dante’s entrance to the Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

But the purpose of this chapter is to describe the process of mourning under the optimal conditions in which ambivalence had not been so marked or extreme, and where mourning processes reactivate what Freud (1917[1915]) and Melanie Klein (1940) described as the normal mourning processes and, in Melanie Klein’s contribution, as the reactivation and reworking through of the depressive position as the central process of such mourning.

Approximately 5 years after my initial contacts with the persons I described in my earlier contribution (Kernberg 2010)—who had lost a spouse after decades of living together, and who had remarried, and whom I had been able to interview extensively—I revisited them with the question of what further changes may have taken place in them throughout those 5 years. (I was able to contact a majority of them, in addition to further reviewing patients’ material and my own experience, having undergone similar vicissitudes in my own life.)

To begin, essentially the same processes that I summarized as the main observations communicated in my previous work continued to be present. Again, during these interviews, mourning reactions became reactivated, together with information provided regarding experiences similar to those they had reported in the original interview 5 years prior, perhaps somewhat attenuated in some cases, but nonetheless, an intense, lively upsurge of reactivation of mourning under sudden emergences of past experiences triggered by present-day life situations. In addition, however, new elements emerged that had not been so clearly observable before.

First, I found a generally changed attitude of these persons toward the potential of serious illness and death. There was a decrease of the anxiety that one might expect would be elicited by the development of symptoms of a potentially serious illness or death, both their own and those close to them. This decreased fear of death and dying at times surprised the subjects of my inquiry themselves. They made comments such as “If he was able to go through this, I shall be able to do it,” a sense of being accompanied by the beloved person who had died in the imagining of one’s own process of dying, and fantasies of the possible reencounter with the dead person after one’s own death even in persons without any religious inclination or convictions in that regard. The sense of death as a reencounter acquired an important function of dealing with one’s own death, particularly if the conviction of being loved by one’s departed partner was very powerful. From an analytic perspective, this may be rooted in both oedipal and preoedipal experiences as the assurance of the permanence of the love of the internalized mother imago. For those who had religious convictions about life after death and who had remarried, fantasies and questions emerged about what would happen to them with the competing love of two persons, the past and the present spouse. This same issue was explored by C.S. Lewis in his dramatic autobiographical essay “A Grief Observed” (Lewis 1961), in which he solved that painful question for himself in the assumption that in the love of God all other conflicts could be reconciled. From a dynamic viewpoint, one may speculate about the projection of oedipal triangulations into the fantasied world after death and the corresponding efforts of defensive denial or sublimatory resolution of conflicts around direct and reverse triangulation (Kernberg 2012).

It impressed me that a more general attitude of tolerance of conflicts seemed characteristic of all the persons interviewed, accompanied by a greater degree of understanding of the viewpoints of others with whom they had experienced themselves in a serious conflict, and an increased capability for forgiveness toward others who had disappointed them or treated them with hostility. This greater degree of tolerance seemed to go hand in hand with greater tolerance for the ambivalence of human relations in general, an increased curiosity in the experiences and motivations of other persons, and the sense of greater understanding and greater freedom to be of help to other persons who were undergoing a mourning process. While some of these changes might be attributed to the general emotional maturation and deepening of self-reflection as an expression of the developmental process of essentially normal individuals, the intensity of this process in the subjects I reinterviewed seemed to them clearly related to the ongoing subtle process of long-term mourning for a lost object.

This greater degree of tolerance may extend to the fantasies about the lost object. For example, in situations of unresolved, significant guilt feelings, the mourned-for object may also be experienced as more tolerant and forgiving toward the surviving partner. The fantasy of a desired reencounter upon the survivor’s own death now may include this more benign and forgiving lost object. The opposite may evolve in cases of pathological mourning: as part of depressive symptomatology, the person may experience the frightening fantasy that he or she will be rejected on such an encounter in the afterlife, resulting in an expansion of a panicky sense of abandonment.

Returning to the interviews, one other experience shared by practically all persons was the increase of thoughts and reflection regarding other losses in their lives, a review of what originally might have been almost peripheral, barely noticed processes of mourning regarding persons other than close and intimately related relatives and friends, but, of course, particularly so regarding one’s own mourned parents, children, or siblings. Revisiting past mourning processes tended to be accompanied by the emergence of the lost love objects from the past, particularly one’s parents, in the manifest content of dreams, very often in the context of scenes of early childhood or adolescence in which the dreamer is both a child and the present adult relating to a live image of the lost object. Old conflicts were relived in combination with the expression of new insights regarding these conflicts in the very interaction dreamed about, so that vivid repetition of the past in the context of present-day reflections about it were condensed into the dream experience. Vivid dreams involving dramatically realistic new experiences with the lost partner were quite frequent and were naturally followed by a painful awakening.

One subject told me that he felt that he lived in two worlds: one of daily reality, in which he felt immersed in the reality of his present human world, and one of his dreams, in which his deceased wife would appear as naturally linked to his present experiences, relating to his present network of close relationships—a scenario that would appear as perfectly realistic during his dreams.