Tra la vita e la morte. Metapsicologia del lutto, C.M. Aslan

Freud never updated “Mourning and Melancholy”, written in 1915, in the light of his later theories such as the death instnct, the structural organization of the mind, the signal anxiety, etc. In the present paper, and utilizing such theories and current conceptualizations deriving from them, the author proposes a metapsychological description that he belives provides a better and more adequate explanation of the clinical facts to be observed in normal as well as in pathological mourning. Very schematically, the psychic representation of the external lost object precedes the loss of such object; therefore, the “patognomic introjection” has no place. The libido does not decathect the external object but, rather, its psychic representation or internal object. Contrary to Freud’s description, the author proposes that the ego (or self representation, according to the model used), once the reality test indicates that the object has been lost, tends to massively decathect the libido from the psychic representation of the object. This would produce an instinctual defusion liberating a considerable destructive quota deriving from the death instinct thus deneutralized. Confronted with this situation, the ego mobilizes its defences, especially the massive libidinal recathexis of the internal object. All these processes, described from a metapsychologically viewpoint, have their clinical co-relation. The process of mourning would display itself in the psychic representation of the lost object, a complex ego, super-ego and ideal structure with conscious and pre-conscious qualities. The mourning process is typically initiated as described above, and goes through different vicissitudes and alternatives decribed in the paper, until its termination. The different modalities of pathological mourning would consist in the arrest of the process in one of its stages.