Introduction

Traditionally, mourning has only been thought of in terms of the grief of bereavement. Even in “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud 1917), the object lost was mostly thought of as deceased, although Freud did begin to incorporate the experience of disappointment into his vision of painful personal loss. In this study, however, the mourning process is redefined in developmental terms to reveal a full view of mourning as the key to psychic transformation.