ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of psychoanalytic understandings of loss, beginning with Freud and Abraham, and explores how object relations theorists (notably Klein and Fairbairn) subsequently developed these understandings. These psychoanalytic understandings are seen to have an enduring value and a contemporary relevance to psychotherapeutic work with couples facing loss. A clinical vignette of a couple who are impacted by the loss of a child is presented as a clinical vertex from which to consider the theoretical developments in psychoanalytic approaches to loss. The chapter begins with Freud’s classic work Mourning and Melancholia in which Freud postulated that melancholia, in contrast to normal mourning, could result in unremitting emotional suffering and misery and in extreme cases could (where there were substantial unconscious sadistic impulses towards the lost loved object) encompass the risk of suicide. The chapter then reviews the contribution of subsequent theorists including Abraham, Klein, and Bion and also includes the ideas of Bowlby and other post-modern theorists.
