ABSTRACT
Many different forms of mourning have contributed to the increasing self-integration that is evolving in Laura. Developmental mourning includes the processing of all the affects of grief as they occur in relation to both object loss, and the related self loss that occurs along with the loss of the object as its ideal fantasy form is surrendered. Disillusionment with the object may be part of repairing self-image and self-experience. Such disillusionment is part of developmental mourning, and it may be experienced along with other forms of mourning. The forms of mourning are interwoven within the fabric of an ongoing psychoanalytic process. One form of mourning that evolved for Laura was that of loss related to fantasies of abandonment, in which she lived traumatic separations that had haunted her since childhood. Laura also experienced the mourning of her real external parents, as they died during her adult life, and as her mother died during the years of her psychoanalytic treatment. Her sense of loss from the past could lead to the sense of loss in the present and vice versa. Often Laura's love for me, in the psychoanalytic object relationship called “therapeutic object relationship” (Grunes 1984) became associated with love for the good parent objects, particularly the good mother, and could lead to the sadness of grief over the loss of her actual parents. Laura relived with much regret the illness and deaths of her parents. For example, during one session Laura explained that as she had looked into my eyes at the end of the prior session, she experienced me as having eyes that were “so soft, warm and tender.” I could interpret this as her projection onto me of a good mother image, after a reparative session in which she resolved a feeling of anger towards me, which involved her transference. During that last session, Laura had projected her mother's phallocentric orientation towards men onto me, seeing me as always taking the side of men against her, prompted by my making a positive and supportive comment about a man she disliked and onto whom she projected a powerful negative judgment of herself. When her associations to this reaction, led her to open to the mournful grief following her anger, she distinctly recalled a memory of her mother's preferential attitude towards men. She realized that she had just viewed me, as prizing my male friends as “stallions,” and consequently felt the loss of the fantasy ideal mother who she had fantasized to place her at the center of her attention at all times! Touching base with this persistent psychic fantasy, Laura then reconnected with me through the differentiation of the mother of the past from me in the present. In doing so she felt a powerful feeling of love that allowed her to see me in a loving aspect, seeing me as having tender eyes towards her: soft, warm and loving. Perhaps what she saw in my eyes was not only the refinding of a good mother, after sorting out the projection of the disappointing mother (the one who only prized men), but she projected her own present feeling of aliveness, creating a good object as well as reexperiencing one. She also felt the actual love I could feel for her, particularly when we had both just shared a significant moment of analytic work. This present loving experience in the therapeutic object relationship allowed a form of forgiveness to develop within Laura towards her internal and formerly internalized parents. In taking in my love, and joining me in the mutuality of experience of the analytic work, and in the give and take of love between us, she was softening and modifying the view of her parents, and of her mother in particular.
