ABSTRACT
Reality testing is a process of coming to term with no longer finding the other, and consists of what Freud called Trauerarbeit, grief work. In the psychoanalytic tradition, Lear here quotes Loewald, internalization refers to “processes of transformation by which relationships and interactions between the individual psychic apparatus and its environment are changed into inner relationships and interaction within the psychic apparatus”. As a consequence of de-metaphorization, that is, of taking the figurative term literally, and of objectifying the loved object, “the magical cure by way of incorporation exempts the subject from the painful process of recognizing the loss”. Lear describes the shift from melancholic waiting to a creative commitment to sense understood as mourning as a shift that grants ghosts the status of being ancestors.
