ABSTRACT
In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud described how inadequate mourning could lead to a pathological identification with the person who is absent or lost. Instead of missing them and letting them go, the melancholic acts as though he has become them. His repetitive self-reproaches may actually represent reproaches towards the person by whom he feels abandoned and with whom he has unconsciously identified. Freud hauntingly and memorably stated: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego . . . as though it [the ego] were an object, the forsaken object” (p. 249). This conceptualisation was a major step forward and laid the basis for further investigation of forms of identification which have proved central to the development of psychoanalysis. However, in the clinical material which I will present in this chapter, we can see a situation in which it is rather the shadow inside the object, the shadow of the object’s internal object, which falls upon the ego. The patient whom I shall describe spontaneously used the same image when she said that she felt she only had a “shadow life”.
