ABSTRACT
In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud had not yet understood the concept of grief as a “circular staircase,” instead seeing the goal of mourning to be detachment from the deceased person, so that the individual could again be free to reinvest in new people and in the world. His later work, “e Ego and the Id” (1923) was to foreshadow the work of more contemporary theorists who see mourning not only as a relinquishment of that which has been lost, but also an internalization, a taking in, of the deceased person in the mind of the bereaved (Aragno, 2003; Baker, 2001; Clewell, 2004; Gaines, 1997; Hagman, 1995; Horowitz, 1990; Kaplan, 1995; Kernberg, 2010; Klass, 1988; Pollock, 1961; Shapiro, 1994). Bereaved spouses do not detach from their loved ones, but rather nd ways to keep a connection, whether that be through concrete personal possessions, dreams, imagined conversations, or a
sense of feeling their presence, all of which contribute to the building of an internal connection with the person who is no longer present (Schuchter, 1986).
