Mourning and Adaptation

Mourning and Adaptation

George H. Pollock

Freud advanced two Principles of Mental Functioning: One based on the pleasure-pain principle. Actions are driven by the function that the external object can perform for the individual, for the discharge of tensions and excitements. The other is for functional reasons. This is the I-It position. The other is seemed as a self-object. This is based on immediate energetic discharges. This type of ego is poorly integrated and immature. Sometimes called the pleasure ego.

The other is orientated to external reality, where there is a discharge delay, which includes the use of memory. The other is seen as distinct and different, uniquely differentiated. Morning for these two types of men will be different.

Term - Psychological lesions.

The function of mourning is to detach the survivor memories and hopes from the dead. To reduce the pain and remorse.

The hostility towards the dead-object is usually repressed as one is trying to intensify the loving feelings at the time. Freud points out that there is always a mix of the two feelings.

People recoil from anything that is painful so there is a revolt in the mind against morning, avoidance sets in. Object constancy has been disrupted.

Klein has commented on the close connection between the testing of reality in normal mourning and the early mental processes. She believed that the early mourning characteristics of the child's reaction to frustration are revived and re-experienced whenever grief occurs in later life.

The stages: Pain - Shock - Impotence -despair- Anger- Frustration. There is a sudden lose of control over inner and outer reality brought on by the sudden loss with a resulting of damming up of narcissistic libido or destrudo. Libido interest and investment is withdrawn from the object and there is a damming up in the ego. With this increase in tension, pain is experienced. This is an emergency adaptation to conserve libido (regression has occurred). The ego is being depleted. A neurous sets in.

When the libido is discharged the pain diminishes. Massive regressive immobilization can result.

Underlying the crying there is a wish for reconciliation.

Repression is the all-powerful defense. Often there is an introject that stays inside. This is what prolongs the mourning. The lost object is held onto inside.

Fantasy is used defensively in ignoring reality. There remains a 'wish'. This is a defensive short-circuiting to avoid the pain, full resolution and integration does not occur. Avoiding the pain can be an attempt to defend against feeling of nothingness and emptiness. To mourn is to come to terms with the nothingness of the Mother and hence the nothing inside the client, emptiness.

Any previous ambivalent feelings, conflicts or hostilities cause guilt and a self-punishing approach.

The integrative task becomes much more difficult with the internal structures, where the prior developmental patterns were defective or distorted.

Where there is poor differentiation between the self and the non-self, where there is poor ego integration, the hypercathected internal object (introject) may be projected and hallucinated as an external object. Hence we have what we often see in the various hallucinations of Psychotic persons, voices, etc.