ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the effects of mourning on the drive organization, when processes of sublimation or somatization follow an experience of mourning. Sublimation is one of the ordinary transformations of the drive, while creation is an exceptional vicissitude. Both phenomena, sublimation and somatization, associated with an experience of mourning, are quite a common feature of ordinary clinical practice. Mourning provokes a crisis in the psychical apparatus. The slow working-through of the mourning process opens up the possibility of new associative links based on conscious memories and recreates a part of what has been lived through while giving it a new meaning. The experience of mourning provokes an unfurling of instinctual forces; the violence is the symptomatic indication of it. The violence clearly reveals the play of instinctual forces on the ego: both libidinal forces and the forces of the death drive that are released by the unbinding set in train by mourning.
