Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning, edited by Lene Auestad, Karnac Books Ltd., London, 2017, 197pp (original) (raw)

2017, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis

Mourning can be thought as a private endeavour, so familiar it seems hardly pathological, writes Freud (1917e [1915])). During mourning, the ego withdraws from the world. It re-visits the different aspects of the lost object, approaches it from a series of different angles. Leader (2008) compares this work to the process leading up to the Cubist image resulting from the combination and reshuffling of the conventional image of a person. Thus there is an aspect of mourning that confronts us with fragmentation, of the object mourned and of the experience of mourning. It is pertinent then to question the act, experience and results of mourning in terms of their possible or impossible completions. Leader suggests that mourning, however private, requires other people; a loss requires recognition, a sense that it has been witnessed and made real. From a different angle, this can be seen to resemble Balint's (1969) claim, drawing on Ferenczi (1928-33) that the trauma is only completed in the third phase, when the adult acts towards the child as if nothing distressing or painful had happened, thus depriving the event that took place of its reality. Trauma is overwhelming in its magnitude (Freud 1895d [1893-95], 1920g, Rabinovich 1990), consists in a shattering of one's experiential world as a safe, stable and predictable place (Stolorow 2007), and it breaks up the unifying thread of temporality-past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition.