ABSTRACT
Mourning' calls to mind obligations imposed by society on the relatives of a dead person for a long or shorter period of time. One forgets that, through its origins and some surviving elements, 'mourning' refers to the psychological phenomenon of physical and mental pain. Mourning is experienced as grief only when death has broken a particularly intense social relationship. Even this relationship cannot easily be enclosed in an individual existence; it encounters the social criterion that the individual is 'affected' by his relationships with another, that the psychological phenomena that arise are not reducible to the—albeit hypothetical—ones of an isolated psychic existence. Recourse to depth psychology and to abnormal forms of mourning requires other justifications. These problems cannot be understood at all without the basic concept of an inter-human reality. Psychoanalysis distinguishes the structure of mourning as a conflict ambivalently directed against the ego modified 'by the shadow of the object'.
