ABSTRACT
For some, “maternal absence” is not only a metaphor or a description of psychic-emotional unavailability, but it also refers to actual loss as well. Even though there are significant differences between the actual loss of one’s mother and her psychic-emotional absence, there are also significant implications and consequences that bind together the actual loss with the experience of her absence from one’s internal life. Through an in-depth analysis of a young woman who lost her mother at the tender age of seven, I would like to highlight a specific defensive mode of coping with a traumatic loss. For some people, the best solution they could find was the creation of an illusory life, in which they and the lost object keep on “living together.” For them, “real” (un-illusory) life means deserting their love object. Hence, they are reluctant to leave the object and go on to live their lives, meaning they are also unable to mourn the loss. The tragic consequence of this is that the patient is unable to fully live her life, not feeling that she can let go of that illusioned unity she has with the lost love object. This unity serves to deny the object loss, but it also draws out one’s psychic-emotional strengths. The following chapter discusses this unique psychic solution, drawing on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and Green’s (1993) the Dead Mother complex, touching on the similarities and differences.
