Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIV, 2005

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA

BY JOHN STEINER

Conflict between facing the reality of loss on the one hand,

and denying it on the other, is explored in clinical mate-
rial drawn from an analysis approaching termination. The
intrapsychic conflict over loss was expressed as a conflict be-
tween morality and reality, and was externalized as a con-
flict between patient and analyst. For the patient, giving
up resentment toward the analyst became tantamount to giv-
ing up the ideal object and losing omnipotence. In the course
of the analysis, his complaints became less convincing, and
the conflict over loss became more conscious, allowing some
moves toward mourning to take place.

Change in psychoanalysis, like change in general, invariably ex-

poses the patient to something new, unknown, and, to a degree,
frightening. It is therefore not surprising to find that, despite the
suffering involved, many patients cling to what is familiar. Yet a
desire for change and a hunger for new things and new develop-
ments drive the patient forward and bring him into conflict with
conservative tendencies, which bind him to the status quo.1 Nor is
it simply a question of the anxiety of the new, since change always
involves giving up the old; it is often the case that relinquishment
of the familiar is the more difficult part of the task.
I will argue that this conflict is critical in both life and in analy-
sis, and becomes acute whenever the status quo is disrupted, of-

1
Masculine pronouns are used to refer to either sex in this paper, for the sake
of simplicity and clarity.

83

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84 JOHN STEINER

ten when a development has taken place and presents the patient
with a new capacity to appraise reality. Development and integra-
tion increase awareness of reality, so that the conflict over loss can
begin to be faced, worked through, and understood. These experi-
ences involve relinquishing omnipotence and facing loss, and the
mental processes entailed have much in common with those that
arise for a bereaved person confronted with an actual death. Just
as in bereavement, the central issue for analytic change is whether
the reality of loss can be faced, with the attendant feelings of
regret, remorse, and guilt. If the patient can tolerate the painful
consequences, he is able to work through the various stages of
mourning and is eventually able to reap the developmental ad-
vantages and enrichments that result.
If reality cannot be faced—and this is at least initially the case
when the loss is significant and painful—then defensive processes
are mobilized, which deny the loss and which lead in the direction
of melancholia. In the patient I will describe, these defensive pro-
cesses involved a variety of mechanisms, including manic triumph,
obsessional control, and sadomasochistic humiliation of his ob-
jects, which lessened in their omnipotence and virulence over the
years of the analysis. However, these defensive processes left the
patient having to contend with what he had done to his objects,
and confronted him with an internal situation similar to that de-
scribed by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). A dam-
aged, reproachful internal object was internalized and held onto
as a concrete object, casting its shadow on the ego. In this way, the
melancholic solution offers a compromise in which the object no
longer exists in the external world, but is retained as an internal
object. It is possessed and controlled in the internal world and
projected onto new objects, who play the same role in the patient’s
mental equilibrium that the original object did.
Although often reluctant and hesitant, my patient also made
moves in the direction of relinquishing his objects, and with them
the melancholic compromise, permitting him to face reality and to
form new relationships. In the early stages of mourning, the con-
flict was unconscious, and the denial of loss and possessive inter-

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 85
nalization of the object were automatic, not subjectively experi-
enced as choices. In later stages, as the reality became gradually
more acceptable, the choices were more apparent and were con-
sciously experienced as such.
It is confusing that the word depression has been applied both
to the state that accompanies mourning and to that which results
from the defenses mounted against mourning. The path that leads
toward facing the loss, and mourning it, is associated with painful
depressive feeling, involving guilt, regret, remorse, and a wish to
make reparation. These feelings were thought by Klein (1952) to
represent the depressive position and are very different from
those observed in depressive illness. Although mixed states are
common, severe depressive illness or melancholia results from
defenses against loss, and hence against all those feelings associ-
ated with the depressive position. The clinically depressed patient
is likely to suffer anxiety and persecution, to harbor grievance, and
to deploy manic and obsessional defenses that aid in denying the
reality of the loss.
Our contemporary orientation to this theme continues to be
indebted to Freud’s (1917) description of both mourning and mel-
ancholia, and gains further depth from his later formulation that
all conflict has deeper roots in the conflict between the life and
death instincts (Freud 1920). While attitudes to this formulation
vary, it seems to me to be particularly applicable to the conflict
over mourning. After a bereavement, the life instinct seems to
slowly recover and to help the patient relinquish attachment to
the dead object and to reengage with life. The death instinct is
more difficult to formulate, but can be thought of as an anti-life
force expressed as the conservative tendency to hold onto the ob-
ject, and in this way, to favor the development of melancholia.
Fortunately, these deeper issues need not concern us in the
everyday task of following a patient in the to and fro of an ana-
lytic session. Here, I believe, the conflicts are nevertheless expres-
sions of the same dilemma about the relinquishment or posses-
sion of the object, but one in which the patient is preoccupied
with a need to be loved, which he believes protects him from cat-

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86 JOHN STEINER

astrophic anxieties. The patient becomes concerned with losing

the love of his good objects, which he fears will confirm the dam-
age he has done to them in his phantasy.2 Sometimes, the feeling
that one is no longer loved can give rise to a terrible feeling of
loss, as though the whole world has collapsed. Freud (1923) sug-
gested that this is linked to the fear of death in melancholia, in
which “the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and
persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved. To the ego, there-
fore, living means the same as being loved—being loved by the
super-ego” (p. 58).
Earlier, Freud (1917) had described melancholia as a form of
pathological mourning related to the loss of love:
In melancholia the occasions which give rise to the illness
extend for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss
by death, and include all those situations of being slight-
ed, neglected, or disappointed, which can import oppo-
site feelings of love and hate into the relationship or re-
inforce an already existing ambivalence. [p. 251]

These “situations of being slighted, neglected, or disappoint-

ed” are met in every meaningful relationship and are part of ordi-
nary experience in life and in analysis. Each of these rejections of
love involves a loss and presents the patient with a conflict that
centers on the capacity and willingness to recognize the reality of
the experience. The central issue remains the capacity to judge re-
ality. In the case of an actual loss through death, Freud (1917) de-
scribed how “each single one of the memories and situations of
expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost
object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer
exists” (p. 255).
In the case of those situations in which the patient is “slighted,
neglected, or disappointed,” and comes to believe that he is no
longer loved, a judgment of reality still has to be made. Here the
judgment involves the question of the loss of love, and the par-

2
The Kleinian spelling of the word phantasy, used specifically to refer to un-
conscious fantasy, is respected in this paper.

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 87
ticular incident of “neglect or disappointment” has to be gone
over, and again the “verdict of reality” applied. The choice deter-
mines whether the loss of love is faced and perceived in realistic
proportions, requiring that an appropriate quantum of guilt be
suffered, and with it, a loss of idealization of both the self and the
object. One of the reasons a judgment of reality seems to be so
difficult in these circumstances is the fact that the external object
remains present, alive, and potentially loving. The patient can
project the internal object onto it, and can keep the hope alive
that the loss can be reversed and the idealization sustained with-
out the need to mourn.
I will argue that an experience of loss arises from a variety of
sources throughout an analysis—sometimes when the patient has
to deal with an actual absence, such as that occurring between
sessions, in breaks, and at the end of an analysis, and often when
the patient feels “slighted, neglected, or disappointed” (Freud 1917,
p. 251). Sometimes, the patient’s development propels him in the
direction of change, as the patient comes to believe that he is
strong enough to survive threats to the status quo.
These reactions to loss are not always recognized as involving
a choice because anxiety tends to take precedence over mourn-
ing. Narcissistic defenses may then be so successful in replacing
loss with an identification that the loss is only recognized if the
narcissistic position begins to give way to a greater reality sense.
Nevertheless, I think that such a loss can be discerned in the in-
teractions in the session, as one observes the patient’s reactions
to change. Rey (1994a, 1994b), for example, has argued that every
meaningful analytic contact, such as that taking place when an in-
terpretation is understood by the patient, has associated with it a
quantum of loss and hence a quantum of depression. The under-
standing of something new means giving up a belief which, in
these circumstances, is experienced as giving up a thing felt to be
a concrete object. It always involves a degree of “being slighted,
neglected, or disappointed,” and confronts the patient with a con-
flict. It is common to see the patient struggle between acceptance
and denial in this setting where acceptance involves a mini-relin-

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88 JOHN STEINER

quishment and a mini-mourning, while denial involves a return

to dependence on a concrete internal object, as well as the rede-
ployment of earlier mechanisms that deny the loss.
I will look at this type of conflict in some clinical material
from a patient who initially denied loss in various ways, and sub-
sequently, as a result of the analytic work, seemed to come closer
to accepting it and to working through the mourning that of
necessity followed. While the mechanisms he used were individ-
ual to him, a pattern emerged that I suspect is fairly common.
First, there was a tendency to transform the conflict from one in-
volving a judgment of reality to one of morality. Rather than ex-
amining the reality of what had happened, the patient expressed
a grievance against an object that had been internalized. The in-
cident that had led to feelings of “being slighted, neglected, or
disappointed” was treated as if it had not happened because it
was unfair and should not have happened. The analyst was ex-
pected to confirm this judgment, and if he failed to do so, the
complaint was turned against him.
We could say that an ego judgment about reality was replaced
by a superego judgment concerned with morality (Britton 2003),
and the question of what had happened was replaced by the ques-
tion of what should have happened. Associated with this shift was
a predominance of grievance over guilt, and of anxiety over de-
pressive feeling.
What seemed to happen in all these defenses against reality
was that an intrapsychic conflict over loss became transformed
into an interpersonal one between patient and analyst. The patient
often seemed determined to draw the analyst into a moral judg-
ment and to create a fight over what was right or wrong. As the
analyst, I was often unable to resist joining in the fight, and found
myself drawn into a collusion to avoid looking at the reality of
what had happened.
This type of collusion to avoid reality is a type of enactment
on the part of the analyst—one that I was often unable to prevent,
and that I believe damaged the neutrality of the analytic setting
and jeopardized the analytic work. Recent research has examined

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 89
the way such enactments lead the analyst to play a part in the pa-
tient’s defensive system, and has led to a better understanding of
the patient’s habitual ways of relating to his objects. Sandler (1976a,
1976b), for example, sees enactments as arising from the way an
internal relationship between the self and an object becomes ac-
tualized in the relationship with the analyst, who is prodded into
playing the part of an internal object, and hence is led to enact
an infantile role relationship.
Of particular importance to the approach I take in this paper
is Joseph’s (1981, 1983) description of the way the patient uses the
person of the analyst to establish a psychic equilibrium that resists
psychic change. She and others (e.g., Feldman 1994, 1997) have
shown that it is through such enactments that the analyst is drawn
into playing a role in the patient’s phantasy, and, as a result, is used
as part of the patient’s defensive system.

CLINICAL MATERIAL
Mr. A was nearing the end of a long and often difficult analysis.
For many years, the pattern of his sessions had included an ini-
tial moment of understanding and contact that sometimes seemed
to reflect insight, but that often came across as a caricature of what
a naive analyst would want to hear. The patient would wait for
my comment, which was only acceptable to him if it took the form
of praise or blame. While he clearly sought praise, often in a quite
childish way, the important issue was that I should make moral
judgments and take sides. Usually, he felt that the injustice he re-
ported could be put right if I gave him unqualified support, but
he was almost equally satisfied if I could be persuaded to criti-
cize him on moral grounds. Almost invariably, my attempt to re-
main neutral and to look at reality rather than morality led to an
angry outburst about what I had said or failed to say. The pre-
dominant complaint was one of injustice, and Mr. A’s failure to
find the support from me that he sought engendered an indignant
incomprehension and resentment.

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90 JOHN STEINER

Gradually, as a result of repeated such experiences, the con-

frontations lessened, and, particularly after we had decided on a
termination date about a year hence, a calmer atmosphere pre-
vailed. Mr. A was less indignant and more thoughtful, but still
found it hard to use his intelligence or to observe what was hap-
pening around him. His predominant response to change was no
longer panic, and when I failed to meet his requirements, he was
less convincing when he complained that he felt desperate, that
I had removed a lifeline, and that everything he had built up was
collapsing. The material no longer had such catastrophic connota-
tions, although he still brought images of terrible isolation and
neglect, which led him to feel he must keep going at all costs to
avoid breaking down. For a long time, contact with depression,
guilt, or with any aspect of loss seemed possible only for brief
periods, although some sadness was evident as he wondered what
it would be like not to come to his session every morning.
Mr. A had always found breaks in the analysis difficult, antici-
pating isolation and anxiety, and, earlier on, he had dealt with
them by making himself busy, often extending my breaks by tak-
ing holidays or business trips of his own. There were many fewer
trips in recent months as he began to realize that his analysis was
soon to end, but some two months before the termination date,
he decided to accept an invitation to give a talk at a business con-
vention in Germany, which would necessitate his missing his usual
Friday session.

The First Session

On the Thursday session immediately before this business trip,

Mr. A began by launching into a description of what he called a
ver y difficult situation. The idea had been put to him that he
might help his son, B, by finding information for him from col-
leagues about job openings. When he did so, at the cost of con-
siderable effort, it had led to disaster. Instead of winning approv-
al from B, the patient was accused of interfering and of tramp-
ling on his son’s independence. Mr. A began to describe a catas-

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 91
trophe, reiterating that he was a terrible failure, that there was
something wrong with his thinking, that wires were connected up
wrongly in his head, and that he was beyond being saved.
The patient continued by saying that he thought this experi-
ence must be a revenge for the feeling of complacency he had felt
in recent weeks, when he thought he had been improving. Things
had been going deceptively well: he had felt good about a direc-
tors’ meeting at work, and about his relationship with his wife,
with whom he had relaxed in the garden over the weekend. He
had gazed with pride at the work he had done on the stone patio,
the flower beds, and the water feature, which all looked nice. It
had made him think that he had built things up again and rees-
tablished a better link with his wife. Now he reiterated that he had
pulled the rug out from under himself and everything had come
crashing down.
Mr. A’s protestations, however, did not carry the same sort of
conviction of previous material of this kind. They seemed more to
show me how trapped he was in his wish to seek approval, and
how difficult it was for him to judge reality. He even acknowl-
edged that he had asked himself why he had collapsed so readi-
ly in the face of his son’s accusations, which he did not quite be-
lieve to be true. He had apologized as if they were true, but now
he was unsure.
I linked the patient’s description of disaster with his anxiety
over the business trip he was to take to Germany the next day, and
interpreted that he was trying to persuade me that this trip would
wreck the analytic work we had done. He was afraid that I disap-
proved of the trip and that my disapproval would lead to disas-
ter. This fear then led to the claim that he had collapsed, and that
my work with him had also collapsed, and I suggested to Mr. A
that he wanted to see whether I would defend the work and not
agree with him that missing his Friday session would be a disaster,
even if it made him feel bad. I added that he did feel we had
done useful analytic work, but that he did not really believe that
it had created the ideal situation he wanted, which would serve to
protect him from reality. I interpreted that neither the ideal fig-

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92 JOHN STEINER

ure of the analyst he had created in his phantasy, nor the collapse
he presented as a disaster, was quite real.
Mr. A seemed to listen, but nevertheless continued to insist
that the disaster was real. When he was with his wife, he felt he had
a family and a home and that he was not alone; but now he had
lost everything.

The Next Session

After the weekend in Germany, Mr. A came back on Monday
in a different mood. He said that a lot had happened since the
last session. First, he received a long e-mail from his son, B, which
was apologetic and open about B’s feelings and plans. Some of
the heat of B’s resentment had been diverted from the patient to
the patient’s aunt; B complained that she was controlling because
she gave money and then expressed an interest in how it would be
used.
The patient said he was surprised because he had only warm
feelings toward this aunt, who had always been an ally for Mr. A
against his father, and who used to take him camping when he was
a boy. He had always been curious as to why it was his aunt and
not his father who took him on such outings. Then, in watching
a television documentary about D-day (broadcast at the sixtieth
anniversary of the landings the previous week), he felt he under-
stood more, and thought that his father had been through enough
pain and discomfort in landing in Normandy and fighting through
Northern France to Germany. He could now understand why his
father had not wanted to go camping, but felt that the war had
left a barrier between them.
I pointed out the contrast between the patient’s mood today
and how he had felt in the previous session on Thursday, before his
trip to Germany, when the world was collapsing around his ears.
I thought that the improved relationship he had established with
me—perhaps in part because I did not collapse on Thursday—had
helped him to understand his father better.
Mr. A replied that he had some thoughts about Germany, and
reminded me that some of the tension in his family lay between his

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 93
mother, who admired Germany, and his father, who, because of
his bitter experiences in the war, had an antipathy to all things
German and idealized the French. When Mr. A gave his talk in
Germany the previous Friday, he was aware of experiencing some
excitement when the Germans were impressed by his work, and
he wondered if this had something to do with his father.
I suggested that the patient might think that, like his father, I
—and psychoanalysis as well—had a history connected with World
War II, and, consequently, he might fear that, like his father, I
might be hurt if he embraced this aspect of Germany with too
much enthusiasm. He said that he had been thinking of psycho-
analysis as German in origin, and then realized it was Austrian and
Jewish. He himself had not been happy in France; he had always
wanted to study at Heidelberg.
Mr. A remembered one remarkable day when he had been
sitting in a café in Germany, near the French border. He had had
a good meal and some wine, and wrote some notes for a business
venture he was planning. He wrote what he thought of as his per-
sonal manifesto. It was long and involved, but it had flowed easi-
ly. If he were to look at it now, he was not sure what he would
think; he might see it as nonsense.
After a silence, the patient added that he felt controlled by
his father, and this made him angry. But as he watched the D-day
documentary, he was moved when the newscasters said that this
was the last time they would go to Normandy; there would be no
veterans left on the next occasion.
I interpreted that he was now more aware of the end of the
analysis, which linked to a time when I would no longer be here.
This created a conflict. He could easily see me as controlling and
as demanding that he submit to my authority. Then, if he rebelled,
he expected a terrible collapse when he felt he was so powerful.
He said, yes, it was a manic sort of freedom and dangerous. He
knew it was connected with fascism and power. He said that as he
got older, his father did seem to realize that when one genera-
tion passes money on to the next, they will not be there to see
how it is spent.

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94 JOHN STEINER

I suggested that he was more aware of having regrets about

having taken the long weekend for the business trip to Germany,
and perhaps feeling he had hurt me, but that he now was less
convinced that his actions and phantasies would lead to a cata-
strophic loss of love and to a collapse. Now, he seemed more aware
of his father’s age and of the ending of the analysis, when I would
not be there to supervise how he used what he had gained from it.
Mr. A said that his father could not tolerate the patient’s suc-
cess and was easily threatened. He was even threatened by the way
plants grew in his garden: they had to be kept in their place—
and, like the plants, Mr. A had always felt that his father tried to
cut him down to size.
I interpreted that he now felt safer with me and believed that
both he and I had survived his long weekend in Germany, despite
his temptation to make an alliance with powerful fascist ideas with
which to attack and triumph over the analysis. But he remained
unsure if he could grow and develop in a more normal way. I
thought he was still unsure whether I could bear to see him do
well and perhaps even become more successful than I was. He
said that he had a number of promising business projects, but he
found it difficult to judge if they were real or just excited and
mad. I suggested that, when his omnipotence was so readily stim-
ulated, he found it difficult to judge his achievements—as well as
mine.

DISCUSSION
The sessions in recent months had shown a thoughtfulness that
seemed to be linked to the patient’s awareness of the end of his
analysis and involved what I thought was a more realistic evalua-
tion of his situation in life. The impending termination revived
earlier losses, some of which provoked feelings of smallness and
vulnerability to which he was particularly sensitive. When he felt
small, he typically felt humiliated and turned to an omnipotent
solution in which he triumphed over his object and reversed the
feeling of smallness. This had often led him to take a break from

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 95
the analysis either when I was about to take one, or (in retalia-
tion) after I had taken one. In recent months, he had not done
this, and at some pain and cost, had managed to sustain contact
with me and to value the sessions. The trip to Germany seemed
to involve a need to rebel against someone he viewed as a tyran-
nical father who threatened him with a humiliating feeling of
smallness. Having decided to miss the Friday session, he reversed
the experience of being left by leaving me to wait for him, and this
made him fear that he had damaged the relationship with me by
establishing his superiority and triumph over me.
What Mr. A felt unable to experience was loss—partly, the loss
of the Friday session itself, but chiefly, the loss of love that he
feared would result from my disapproval. He could not accept
a degree of guilt that left him intact, and that also left the relation-
ship with me intact. Instead, he continued to present his situation
as though his world had collapsed, and he seemed to be identify-
ing with a collapsed internal object to whom he was linked by
mutual feelings of blame and resentment. At this point, he did not
feel sufficiently free to think in a way that would permit tolerance
of the bad feelings that arose over missing a session at this stage
of his analysis. Rather, he relied on an identification with a con-
crete internal object that led to a return toward melancholia.
The self-reproaches that dominated the session had the same
quality as those in “Mourning and Melancholia” that Freud (1917)
pointed out were directed toward an internal object. Mr. A’s sense
of having built up internal strength through the analytic work was
present in the form of improved relationships at his work and also
with his wife, but alongside this was a phantasy of an omnipotent
son who could destroy everything that his father had been trying
to build. He was turning to a more primitive world, peopled by
retributive figures operating at a moralistic and punitive level, and
I was meant to feel that my work with him could not stand up to
the power of those forces.
Nevertheless, the complaints lacked force, and the patient
even expressed the idea that he was too ready to agree with his
son that he had been in the wrong. This led me to think that he

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96 JOHN STEINER

had a picture of me as someone who would see his guilt, and also
his anger and distress, but keep it in proportion and not over-
react.
In the second session, a degree of defensiveness remained,
but Mr. A was more reflective and able to bring thoughts that
helped him to understand his reactions to me and to see their
similarity to those his son had with him, and that he had with his
father. Seeing the documentary about the D-day landings put him
in touch with appreciative feelings toward his father. As he under-
stood his father more sympathetically, he was less resentful toward
him—for example, about his not having taken him camping.
When his ideas were admired by the German audience at his busi-
ness presentation, he was reminded of the manifesto he wrote in
the café on the French-German border, and he connected his
sense of freedom and power with an escape from an analysis that
restricted him and that he felt was trying to “cut me down to size.”
It seemed to me that the patient was taking a step in the direc-
tion of acknowledging loss and mourning it, and that this made
him feel less trapped in an identification with a melancholic ob-
ject. The conflict nevertheless repeatedly returned, and he swung
between accepting the reality of the loss of his analysis and deny-
ing it. Once the analysis ended, he would not feel so controlled
and cut down to size, and could use his inheritance as he thought
fit. But he was also aware of the violence of his protest and of
the powerful fascist alliances he made in his phantasy, through
which he believed he could destroy what I and his father stood for.
To work through the mourning would involve recognizing the
guilt and shame that arose in relation to these phantasies. It was
not really the loss of the Friday session that bothered him, but
rather, the recognition that he sought strength from powerful
forces that he did not really approve of, but that helped him re-
verse his feeling of being small and distressed at the imminent loss
of the analysis.
I believe that the patient was in touch with his regret over the
conflict with me, which he saw as a kind of power struggle, and he

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 97
hoped that, like his own son, he could be more open and allow
a reconciliation with me to take place. However, this reconcilia-
tion made him feel more aware of endings. He had spoken re-
cently of my age, his father’s age, and of the possibility of my re-
tirement after the end of his analysis. The realization that I would
no longer be there to check on how he used the analysis made
him feel more free, but at the same time, he was reluctant to give
up his power over me because that meant relinquishing his nar-
cissistic defenses against the loss. At the end of the session, he
once more turned to the difficulty he had in making judgments,
as he tried to apply the verdict of reality to both his creative work
and to my work with him.

Choice and Conflict in Mourning

I believe that the choices facing the patient were similar to

those facing a bereaved person, and that these involve a painful
conflict between relinquishment and possession of the lost object.
Even in normal mourning, in the early stages, attempts are made
to deny the experience of loss, and these must be overcome if the
subject is to proceed to the later stages of mourning, where the
reality of the loss is faced (Bowlby 1980; Lindemann 1944; Parkes
1972).
In the early stages, the patient attempts to deny the loss by
trying to possess and preserve the object, and one of the ways he
does this is by identification with it. Every interest is abandoned
by the mourner except those connected with the lost person, and
this total preoccupation is designed to deny the separation and
to ensure that the fate of the subject and of the object are inex-
tricably linked. Because of the identification with the object, the
mourner believes that if the object dies, then he must die with it,
and, conversely, if the mourner is to survive, then the reality of
loss of the object has to be denied. It is often at this first stage
that mourning becomes stalled, as the defenses leading to melan-
cholia are deployed. Indeed, melancholia can be thought of as a
failed mourning.

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98 JOHN STEINER

The conflict becomes more conscious as the patient’s reality

sense persuades him that the loss can be faced, while the patient’s
preferences, in contrast, create the illusion that the object remains
alive. The compromise provided by the melancholic solution that
up to now has sustained an equilibrium no longer satisfies the
patient, as he begins to become aware of the wish to once more
engage in life and to allow development to proceed.
This type of conflict is vividly described by Klein (1940, p.
355) in the patient she calls Mrs. A.3 After the sudden death of
her son, Mrs. A began sorting out her letters, keeping his and
throwing others away. Klein suggests that she was unconsciously
trying to restore the son and to keep him safe, throwing out what
she considered to be bad objects and bad feelings. At first, she did
not cry very much, and tears did not bring the relief that they
did later on. She felt numbed and closed up, and she also stopped
dreaming, as though she wanted to deny the reality of her actual
loss and was afraid that her dreams would put her in touch with it.
Then she dreamed that she saw a mother and her son. The
mother was wearing a black dress, and she knew that her son had
died or was going to die. This dream put Mrs. A in touch with
the reality not only of her feeling of loss, but also of a host of
other feelings that the associations to the dream provoked, includ-
ing those of rivalry with her son—who seemed to stand also for
a brother, lost in childhood, and to bring up various other primi-
tive feelings that had to be worked through.
Later, she had a second dream in which she was flying with her
son when he disappeared. She felt that this meant his death—-
that he was drowned. She felt as if she, too, were to be drowned,
but then she made an effort and drew away from the danger, back
to life. Her associations showed that she had decided she would
not die with her son, but would survive. In the dream, she could
feel that it was good to be alive, and this showed that she had
accepted her loss; sorrow and guilt were still experienced, but

3
In fact, Mrs. A was Klein herself, who was reacting to the death of her son in
a mountaineering accident (Grosskurth 1986).

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 99
with less panic, since she had lost her previous conviction of her
own inevitable death.
Here Mrs. A pulls herself away from death, toward life, but has
to suffer the painful consequences of separateness between herself
and the son she lost. We can see that the capacity to acknowledge
the reality of the loss, which leads to the differentiation of self
from object, is the critical issue that determines whether mourn-
ing can proceed. This involves the task of relinquishing control
over the object, and means that the earlier trend aimed at posses-
sion of the object and denying reality has to be reversed. The indi-
vidual must face the inability to possess, preserve, and protect the
object. His psychic reality comes to include the realization that the
individual’s love and reparative wishes are insufficient to preserve
the object, which must be allowed to die, with the consequent des-
olation, despair, and guilt.
These processes involve intense mental pain and conflict, and
it is a part of the function of mourning to work through and re-
solve such conflicts. In analysis, they become acute when disrup-
tions threaten the analytic setting, and, in the case of the patient
I described, they became more conscious as the termination of
his analysis approached. The impending loss of his analyst ac-
centuated Mr. A’s wish to retain the status quo, in which the ana-
lyst was available to support a defensive organization, and, at the
same time, a growing sense of reality—also accentuated by the im-
pending loss—made the patient aware that his analyst would soon
cease to be available, and enabled him to turn to his own resources
to anticipate and mourn this loss.

Grievance as a Means of Avoiding Loss

One of the many remarkable observations Freud made in

“Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) concerned the self-reproach-
es of the melancholic patient. These, he suggested, were actually
reproaches against an internal object with which the patient had
identified. This seems to be an important characteristic of the de-
pressed patient, whose resentments provide him with a link to

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100 JOHN STEINER

the internal object. Often, the grievance centers around an early

narcissistic wound inflicted on the patient by a mother who failed
to fulfill what was believed to be a promise of narcissistic perfec-
tion. The counterpart to the grievance is the hope provided by a
persistent belief in the existence of an ideal object who will re-
verse the injustice and fulfill the promise. It seems particularly
difficult to apply a reality sense to these objects—both the resent-
ed one and the ideal one; they are easily recognized as the same
object, and the resented figure has only to admit fault and agree
to change in order to become ideal.
Britton (2003) has pointed out that the internalized figure to-
ward whom grievance is directed is not seen as a bad object, but
rather as a good object behaving badly. In the analytic situation,
both the resentment and the hope are projected onto the analyst,
and pressure is applied to make good the resentment by fulfilling
the hope.
In these conflicts, a struggle takes place between reality and
morality, since what the patient considers to be a just solution
comes into conflict with what is observed to be a realistic one. Of-
ten, the central issue is the loss of the ideal object and of the ideal
self that it brings into being. The intense longing for the ideal ob-
ject to take away all feelings of badness, especially feelings of per-
secution, failure, humiliation, and guilt, is an important part of
the early relationship to the breast. Klein (1957) wrote about this
as follows:

The infant’s longing for an inexhaustible and ever-pres-

ent breast stems by no means only from a craving for
food and from libidinal desires. For the urge even in the
earliest stages to get constant evidence of the mother’s
love is fundamentally rooted in anxiety. The struggle be-
tween life and death instincts and the ensuing threat of
annihilation of the self and of the object by destructive
impulses are fundamental factors in the infant’s initial
relation to his mother. For his desires imply that the
breast, and soon the mother, should do away with these
destructive impulses and the pain of persecutory anxiety.
[pp. 179-180]

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 101
It was the analyst’s failure to provide such magical relief that
reinforced Mr. A’s resentment, and it was the continuing possi-
bility that he might yet do so that kept that hope alive, and that
persuaded the patient he could continue to avoid facing the reali-
ty of loss. In the process, he could also continue to avoid coming
to terms with the loss of his omnipotence.

CONCLUSION
In the first session, I reported how Mr. A put pressure on me to
agree that his world had collapsed. He behaved as if an ordinary
good relationship, one in which guilt and disappointment can be
tolerated and survived, had failed to develop. He felt that he had
lost the positive relationship he had developed with me in analy-
sis, and he could not face the reality either of his present state or
of the idealized and quite evidently unreal phantasies he had
previously erected. These phantasies were connected with the be-
lief that I could take away all his feelings of distress and guilt
and restore him to an ideal state, making him feel loved and pro-
tected. Although he was clearly distressed and disappointed, I felt
that he did not completely believe his own propaganda, and he
seemed to recognize that he wanted to see if I could sustain con-
fidence in him and in our work.
Nevertheless, in that first session, the patient was in no mood
to look at the reality of, or to mourn the loss of, his omnipo-
tence. Nor could he face the loss of the idealized analyst who, he
believed, had promised him that all his damaged objects could
be restored without any need for guilt or pain. The overwhelm-
ing mood was of collapse and grievance that I had failed him.
In the second session, the atmosphere was different. Mr. A
had survived the long weekend occasioned by his business trip to
Germany, and I was seeing him as usual, without any apparent
acrimony. The program on the D-day invasion had touched him
and allowed a more sympathetic attitude to prevail. Later in the
session, he came closer to the recognition that he admired things
German in opposition to his father, just as he had taken a long

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102 JOHN STEINER

weekend away in opposition to the analysis, and he felt some re-

lief that I had not overreacted to this. The sense of freedom he
had had in Germany seemed connected with the escape from a
critical, overbearing analyst, and he was aware that this view of
me made him turn to an alliance with what he saw as a fascist
power in order to oppose me. It was partly this awareness that
made him more understanding of my response to him—and, I
think, led him to recognize some of the strain that working with
him involved.
It seemed to me that these thoughts were connected with the
patient’s awareness that the analysis was ending, as well as with a
similar awareness that his parents were aging, so that this was like-
ly to be the last D-day celebration they would witness. I thought
he was nearer to accepting these realities and to forming a more
realistic view of the state he was left in. Mr. A himself felt that he
had changed as a result of his analysis, but his position was far
from what he had hoped for, and even the achievements he rec-
ognized were felt to be insecure, easy to undermine and destroy.
Resentment could come to dominate his relationships with little
provocation, and the working through of mourning was post-
poned by the absence of a sense of finality about the ending of the
analysis.
As the termination approached, the conflict seemed to me to
become increasingly conscious, involving Mr. A in agonizing
choices. He came nearer to communicating an appreciation of
what the analysis had achieved, as well as to the recognition of
how disappointed he was that it had not achieved more. He was
desperate to be left in a state of certainty and security, and he
resented the fact that we were likely to end without his being
able to resolve the conflict—which was more clearly revealed, it
seemed to me, to be a conflict between his feelings of love and
hatred.
When this conflict seemed impossible to resolve, the patient
continued to try to transform it into a conflict between what was
really the case and what he felt should be the case, and that led
him into the area of grievance when he felt what should have

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CONFLICT BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 103
been offered to him had not been. This grievance, which I thought
had its roots in his resentment toward an idealized internal ob-
ject who kept failing him, found expression as a conflict between
the two of us, and erupted with great intensity when he was con-
fronted with the inevitability of his disappointment with me.
I, too, had to face my disappointment, and I was helped when
I was able to accept the limitations of my work and of psycho-
analysis in general. I was also sustained by the idea that a good
deal of working through and mourning for the loss of an analysis
takes place after the analysis is over.

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