ABSTRACT
Both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein consider object structure—with its ego and superego correlates—as an essential dimension of the states of mourning and depression. In the states belonging to the depressive series, mourning cannot be accomplished, and the person remains somehow tied to an object that can neither come to life again nor completely die. One could say that a person in a depressive state lives in submission to a dead-alive object, even though this does not appear immediately in a manifest way in his analytic material. Like the unburied dead in ancient Greek and Latin culture, their greatest pain is not to be able to find peace in death. The dead-alive son in the story is equivalent to her cousin, alive but with rotten eyes. The dry monkey’s paw is another representation of the dead-alive object. Depressive anxiety is thus controlled by focusing and synthesizing both fantasies and libidinal and sadomasochistic impulses.
