ABSTRACT
Mourning refers to the process of psychological burial of the mental double, the mental representation—a collection of images——of a dead person or lost thing. The physical burial of a corpse or the disappearance of a family home by fire does not remove the mental doubles of these lost entities from the mourner’s mind. V. Tahka wrote that “normal” mourning only comes to a practical end when the image of the deceased or the lost thing becomes “futureless”. The mourner divides the mental representation of the lost object into hundreds of images and deals with them one by one, often repeatedly. The nature of the mental representation of the lost object in the mourner’s mind, and conditions in which the loss has occurred, influence the mourning process. Perennial mourners, to a large degree, cannot identify with the enriching aspects of the mental images of the lost object and adaptive ego functions associated with it.
