ABSTRACT
On the couch adult Peter remembered how angry he was because Gregory had taken his mother away from him, and receiving the toy pistol felt like he was being bribed. But oedipal issues continued to come up on the couch. Peter would come to understand how he had also utilised such issues to grasp on to a grandiose self for most of his adult life. On the couch Peter started talking about the fact that he had three Bronze Star Medals and Gregory had none. Mourning is an obligatory psychobiological response to any significant loss, concrete or abstract, or even to the threat of any loss. A successful mourning process refers to the mourner’s review of the images of persons or things that are lost again and again, and then achieving the ability to no longer be psychologically preoccupied with the mental images of what was given up—in other words, making such images “futureless”.
