ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein integrated her conceptualization of mourning process with her primary clinical and phenomenological theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. It is within the psychic state of the depressive position that guilt and loss are experienced since attachment to an ambivalently loved object can be tolerated. Once guilt and loss are experienced, related to an amalgamation of love and hate for the object, with the predominance of love over hate, mourning becomes possible. Since mourning is so critical to self and psychic integration in the theory of Klein, the depressive position tolerance for sustaining love, along with the tolerance for conscious aggression for a lost object becomes the fulcrum of psychic growth, change and transformation. This has prompted Caper (1988) to comment that Klein's depressive position should actually be called a mourning position. I would concur with Caper's view. Depression, unlike a psychic state of readiness to mourn, refers to the blocked melancholic state referred to by Freud. Depression is a state of deadness promoted by defensive muscular and psychic control which operate against psychic capacities and strivings that promote grief and grieving. By contrast, Klein's depressive position is a psychic state of conflict and process, not a state of pathological deadness. The depressive position comes in shifts of progressive internal self and object integrations that supersede and alternate with paranoid-schizoid position psychodynamics. Unlike the splitting off and projecting of disowned parts of the self, in the depressive position the painful aspects of the self are contained and psychically processed. Affect experience is the main route to this process, whereas mourning is the overall gestalt of this affective process that involves the resolving and integrating of internal object relations as psychodynamic process.
