ABSTRACT
There are two main components to a successful work of mourning: conducting a review of the relationship in order to assess what it meant to us and then turning it into a futureless memory. In his landmark paper "Mourning and Melancholia," Sigmund Freud noted that we never willingly give up our emotional attachments: Just because we have been abandoned doesn't mean we stop relating to the abandoner. The concept of psychic doubles is essential to understanding the work of mourning. The work of mourning involves taking the heat out of the loss and cooling down the psychic double. The ability to do the work of mourning is tied to our developmental history. Without a history or healthy separations, the work of mourning goes much more slowly. Evidence of the work of mourning is often projected into our everyday life. To end mourning, we turn the psychic double into a memory and free ourselves from its power.
