The Struggle Against Mourning

Deals with obstacles in the mourning process as experienced in individual cases and in large groups, in life-threatening situations. This book describes the therapeutic tools that the author employed to achieve healthy outcomes. It focuses on various defenses, their function and importance, and on the difficulty of relinquishing them.

The main questions raised in this book are: How does the analyst help the patient to be in touch with pain and mourning? Is the relinquishment of defenses always desirable? And what is the analyst''s role in the mourning process—should the analyst struggle to help patients relinquish defenses against pain and mourning, which they may experience as vital to their precarious psychic survival? Or should he or she accompany patients on their way to self-discovery, which may or may not result in the patients letting go of their defenses when faced with the pain and mourning inherent in trauma? the utilization of various defenses and the resulting unresolved mourning reflect the magnitude of the anxiety and pain that is found on the road to mourning. The ability to mourn and the capacity to bear some helplessness while still finding life meaningful are the objectives of the analytic work in this book.