ABSTRACT
Mourning is older than psychoanalysis; it is older than poetry; it may be older than mankind, for human are not the only species to manifest the process. The practice of analysis provides many opportunities to see evidence of the value of mourning in increasing adaptation to reality and the enrichment of mental life. S. Freud suggested that mourning is a form of psychic work analogous to the concept of working through in analysis. Karl Abraham suggested, in 1911, that depression stood in the same relation to normal mourning for a loss as did morbid anxiety to ordinary fear. The cause of the apprehension in neurotic anxiety states is unconscious and so is the cause of grief in the depressions. One could say that in both depression and the perversion the normal process of mourning has gone wrong and that it has gone very wrong in the early stages of development.
