ABSTRACT
The author suggests (Benedek, 1950) that facing the losses of the menopause in positive terms (Meyer, 2002) depends on the capacity constructed in preceding life for working through mourning; including primary, Oedipal, puberty and single-life mourning, and also that experienced in everyday life. This requires a constant contact with internal and external reality, and therefore contact with psychic pain and a capacity for coping with it. The mourning dreams of a fifty-five year old analysand are presented here, in which she mourns the loss of her young body and sexuality, of biological fertility, and of the children who have left home to form their own family. Among these dreams there is one of recapitulation (Guillaumin, 1979) in which she integrates various periods of her life.
