ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the impact of unresolved loss or melancholia, arising from the loss of a parent in childhood and its effect on the capacity for coupling as an adult. This thinking arose out of work with several cases which presented with a particular constellation of difficulties and a similar aetiology. In each instance, there had been a loss of a mother through death, before the age of 11. The conceptualisation of these cases broadly derives from the theory of Kleinian object relations (“inner links”) and Kohut’s self-psychology. Green’s concept of the “dead mother” (1983) is also referred to extensively. This is a psychic object that shapes experience and is used here as a way of explaining difficulties in coupling that connect to the early loss of a mother, especially where there is no compensatory maternal capacity in the surviving parent and where the pre-existing relationship with the mother had not yet fostered the child’s capacity to mourn.
