Contents

Foreword

When a Loved One Dies

Death and Mourning Mirrored in a Series of Dreams

Dreams as Guides During the Process of Mourning

The Phase of Denial

The Phase of Emotional Chaos

The Phase of Search and Separation

The Phase of New Relationship to Oneself and the World

When Mourning is Prolonged or Repressed

Problems in the Phase of Denial

Problems in the Phase of Emotional Chaos

Problems in the Phase of Search and Separation

Symbiosis and Individuation

Making a Commitment to Life while Living with Leave-taking

Bibliography

About the Author

 

Foreword

This book, originally published in 1982 in German, was translated without alteration into English in 1988. The original character of the book has been preserved although a great many additional thoughts on the subject of mourning have occurred to me over the years. A supplementary text dealing with the nature of relationships and related processes associated with separation has already appeared in English in The Nature of Loving: Patterns of Human Relationship (Chiron Publications, Wilmette, Illinois, 1986), and a further investigation into the distinction between depressive reactions and reactions of grief is in progress.

This investigation into the significance of mourning in the therapeutic process became a matter of pressing importance for me through my practical work as a psychotherapist. In the course of the last ten years, it again and again struck me in the treatment of many depressive illnesses that loss experiences had been too little mourned. It seemed clear that they could be an additional factor contributing to depressive illness.

The taboo surrounding death has been lifted in recent years. It is now ‘permissible’ to speak of dying. It seems to me that the time has come to also lift the taboo surrounding mourning: we may and we should mourn. Indeed, Freud wrote as early as 1915 about the great value of the “work of mourning” – the term originates from him. Nevertheless, the great influence which grief has on our psychic health is not in proportion to the rather scant attention paid to it in the literature of psychology.

For a period of ten years, I gathered material on this subject, dream material in particular; on the basis of this material, I will try to illustrate systematically the way in which the unconscious prompts us to deal with mourning. I have set out my own observations in relationship to the results described in the more recent literature.

The following factors were of the greatest importance in my investigations:

– Because we perceive ourselves in a fundamental way in terms of relationships to others and because bonds are an essential part of the way we perceive ourselves and the world, these perceptions will be severely shaken by the death of a loved one. Grief is the emotion through which we take leave and deal with problems in the now collapsed relationship. Through mourning we can integrate as much as possible of this relationship and the partner in ourselves in order to be able to go on living with a new self-perception and in a new relationship to the world.

– From our dreams we receive valuable guidance in the task of mourning, which I try to illustrate by means of a dream series. Consideration of current literature on the phases of mourning has led me to make some modifications in my own point of view.

– Each of the phases of mourning presents special difficulties to be surmounted. Using practical examples from my therapeutic work, I shed some light on these difficulties.

– The need to linger in a symbiosis stands in opposition to the need to separate. In extreme cases this longing causes a long-term fusion with the deceased. I propose the hypothesis that the rhythm of symbiosis and individuation is essential not only for the small child, but for the adult as well. It seems to me to be important that the symbiosis between individuals is succeeded by a relationship to something transcendent.

– The death of a loved one is an extreme experience of death which requires radical mourning. At the same time, this event is an enormous challenge to the individual to develop his own potential when confronted with change. Mourning can lead to greater self-realization. What is true in this extreme situation might also hold true, though in a less radical form, in many other human situations – situations in which it will be seen that death is always present in our lives, again and again demanding greater or lesser changes coupled with feelings of loss which therefore must also be mourned. Because we are mortal, we must exist in the “readiness to take leave.” We are bound to sadness and pain and to the possibility of having to repeatedly rebuild our lives and also to unfold new potential as individuals as a result of the many leave-takings. In this respect, mourning is indispensable.

I would like at this point to thank all my analysands who have permitted me to use and publish their material.

My thanks go also to Robert Hinshaw, who made this book available to readers in the English language, and to Diana Dachler and Fiona Cairns who translated the book with competence and empathy.

 

 

Verena Kast

 

When a Loved One Dies

When a loved one dies, we experience what death is. The experience of death affects us deeply, disrupts our lives, and fills us with doubts not only regarding ourselves, but with respect to everything that we have until now taken for granted. It not only disturbs the way we perceive ourselves and the world, it compels us to change, whether we want to or not.

When a loved one dies, we not only experience our own deaths in an anticipatory way through this event; in a certain sense, we also die with him. At no other time are we made so sharply aware of the extent to which we understand and experience ourselves in terms of our relationships to others, and to what extent the loss of such a relationship tears us apart and demands of us a new orientation.

It is an experience as old as mankind itself. Among the many witnesses to this was the young St. Augustine, who had experienced the death of a friend. 1

“Through this pain, a deep darkness came over my heart, and wherever I looked, there was death. The city I called home became a torment for me, the house of my father a place of rare unhappiness, and each and every thing that I had shared with him became for me now, without him, a source of unending pain. Everywhere my eyes searched for him, and he was not there. I hated everything, because he was no longer a part of it, and it could no longer say to me: ‘See, he comes,’ – as it had been when he still lived, when he was only absent. I became a single great question, and I searched in my soul to know why it was so sad, why it so confused me, but my soul knew not how to answer. And when I said to it: Have faith in God, it did not obey, and it was right not to, because this friend, whom it counted as most precious and had lost, was better and truer than the illusion that I held out to it as hope. Only weeping was still sweet to me and among the joys of my heart took the place of my friend.

Within me … an emotion of the most contradictory nature came to life – I don’t know what it was: a complete weariness with life side by side with a fear of death. I believe that the more I loved him, the more I hated and feared death, which stole him from me like the grimmest of enemies, and I imagined death would suddenly devour everyone, because it had been able to devour him … It surprised me, in other words, that the remaining mortals continued to live while he whom I loved so much had died, as if he might not have had to die, and even more I wondered at the fact that I, as his other ego, survived his death. Someone once called his friend the half of his soul (Horace, Od. 1.3): For I have felt mine and his soul as one in two bodies (reference to Ovid, Trict. IV, 4, 72), and for this reason I shuddered in the face of life, because I did not want to live as half a man; and for this reason I was afraid to die, because he, whom I loved so much, would then have died completely.”

In this short text by St. Augustine many aspects of the behavior of someone who has suffered a great loss are expressed: the disturbance in the way he perceives the world, in that all that was formerly familiar to him becomes a torment. It is as if death had thrown its shadow over everything which was before, even over external things (the house of his father, for example). Here it becomes clear just how much the relationship between two individuals creates a shared world, so that death carries with it the fact that this shared experience of the world is no longer possible. Thus, one aspect of the mourning process must be the creation of a new relationship to the world. But still, and this is typical for the first phase following a great loss, St. Augustine is not concerned with creating something new, with searching for something new; on the contrary, he still searches for his friend. Lindemann 2 describes the restlessness of people who have suffered a severe loss: the impulse to do something, to go off in search of something, which is opposed by a lack of goal orientation. Parkes 3 did not see this searching behavior as being goalless, but saw the goal as that of finding the lost partner. St. Augustine appears to have experienced this very consciously.

Thus, to mourning also belongs the task of understanding this restlessness, of comprehending it as an effort to reestablish both the world as it was and to recreate the original relationship structure that was shattered by the death. It must also be understood quite simply as resistance against the change, which life now demands.

St. Augustine describes his condition as sad, confused, “a complete weariness with life side by side with a fear of death,” the only relief being weeping. He hated and feared death simultaneously.

In his weariness with life, one sees the extent to which this death event altered his perception of himself and the world: if the friend lives no more, why should he go on living? Yet the fear of death serves to counterbalance these suicidal ideas, as does the thought that, should he himself also die, the friend would be completely dead, because he then could live on in no one’s memory.

I feel that hate is also a fundamental part of the process of mourning; in the case of St. Augustine, it is a hatred of death. In my practice as an analyst, I have observed that this hatred is often directed against a godly authority, or against the partner or child who has been lost. Suicidal ideas frequently occur in connection with a great loss. Suicide would be a way of “solving” the many problems that have been caused by the loss. According to a study by Bowlby, 4 the number of individuals who actually commit suicide following a death is rather small. On the other hand, the tendency to alleviate the pain through the taking of drugs of all sorts may develop.

To have “a darkness over the heart,” to be sad, to be confused, to suffer simultaneously from an aversion to life and a fear of death, to become a living question: all this shows how much not only St. Augustine’s perception of the world is shaken, but also his understanding of himself. When St. Augustine says: “… I have experienced his soul and mine as one in two bodies, and for this reason I shuddered in the face of life, because I did not want to live as half a man…” then we can speak of his having suffered a loss of self. It is integral to human life that one’s self-perception derives fundamentally from relationships to others, that we often experience as “ourselves” what others have evoked in us and continue to call forth. Our relationship to our innermost self, is influenced by the relationships that we have to others, love relationships in particular. In this way a loved one becomes “one half of our soul,” belonging in an essential way to our being, determining our feelings toward life and our view of life, without our having the feeling of being manipulated because we have let someone get so close to us that he is a part of ourselves. If we are struck by the loss of someone who is this close, then in fact a part of us also dies. 5 Gabriel Marcel 6 wrote, “The one fundamental problem will be posed by the conflict love-and-death.”

Thus the death of one we love is a death problem and an experience of death with which we must come to terms and which we must endure as part of our own passage through life toward our own deaths. It is an extreme life situation which can alter us, but which can set us free to see what is really essential, and it is a situation that can also break us.

Whether we succeed in bringing new perspectives to the way we perceive ourselves and the world, to see consciousness of death also as an aspect of our self-awareness, or whether we collapse, grieve pathologically and never emerge from mourning, is essentially dependent on whether we really understand how to mourn. Grieving should no longer be regarded as a “weakness,” but as a psychological process of the greatest importance to the health of a person. For who is spared loss? And if we do not actually have to deal with the death of someone we love, life affords partings enough, and these can bring about loss reactions similar to those which occur when we lose a loved one.

It seems to me important to bear in mind how abruptly the life of a person can change through the death of a life partner, how many difficulties the one left behind is faced with. All this must be coped with in a psychological state of mind that makes problem-solving almost impossible.

Let us once again visualize the problems. Outwardly life changes because a wife becomes a widow; under certain circumstances, she has to struggle with financial problems, with raising the children alone and perhaps with seeking a new partner. Alternatively, if the widow is older, she suddenly has to spend the evening of life alone, perhaps without the necessary practical skills for this, because the husband had always done everything for her. Outwardly life also changes in the sense that a mourner will suddenly be treated in a different way by those around him or her. At worst, the mourner will be tabooed, almost in the same way as death itself; at best he will not be avoided but will be handled “carefully” and unnaturally. People often don’t know exactly how to interact with someone who is mourning, and typically they solve this problem by distancing themselves from the mourner. Loneliness is now added to grief and the experience of loss, the feeling of no longer belonging. Parkes 7 in his book dealing with bereavement and life crisis in connection with the loss of a partner, a study of young widows, describes many of these social factors.

The world treats those in mourning in a different way from those who are not mourning. The more grief and death are repressed in a society, the less spontaneously this society will interact with those who mourn and the more quickly this society will demand that one finally put an end to the mourning process.

It is not only that the world approaches the mourner differently; the mourner himself experiences the world in a different way. He has suffered a loss, he is completely preoccupied with a problem that attracts still more problems. He has neither interest nor strength for anything else. He cannot approach others, even when he has an urgent need to do so, precisely because the warmth of others could hinder him from completely losing faith in life. In addition to the fact that no-one comes forward to meet him, he cannot approach others who expect that a mourner carry on life in a “normal” way. This happens in our society because we lack a ritualized mourning process, such as still exists, for example, among practicing Jews. 8 In his troubles the mourner distances himself still further and soon experiences the world that he is no longer capable of dealing with as hostile. In this way, a circle of isolation, fear and estrangement from the environment may set in, in which a new attitude toward life can be built up only with difficulty if at all. Paranoid reactions can set in.

The mourner no longer understands the world, and often he does not understand fate any more either. Particularly following the death of those who “die before their time,” the meaning of life is questioned: a question to which an answer can hardly be given. In such a situation the stock answers that are offered sound like mockery to the ears of the grieving person and are not much help. It is part of the mourning process to endure this meaninglessness and go on living nevertheless, be it in the hope that meaning will show itself once again, or in remembrance that life was once filled with meaning. Alternatively one can live on courageously in complete doubt as to meaning, existence, God, the human being, or at the very least rendered uncertain by the price that one must pay for the loss of a human bond, and deeply uncertain whether one is ready to pay this price ever again.

But not only these uncertainties as to the meaning of existence plague the mourner; he is truly shaken, changed. His response to life has altered. The way he experiences himself is no longer the same.

A fifty year old man, who lost his wife after a long and difficult illness, described his condition thus:

“I thought I had prepared myself for the loss. I had had more than enough time to do it. But now that she is dead, I feel that everything is quite different from the way I had imagined it. It is so irretrievable. I sense the magnitude of death; I have learned what is important and what is unimportant. But with what I have learned I can no longer live among others, I have become an eccentric. And then I feel so uncertain. She took so much away from me into the grave, sometimes I ask myself whether enough remains to live.”

A forty-five year old woman who had lost her husband in a traffic accident said:

“It is as if someone had torn him away from me without warning, and I feel as if I am deeply wounded, I am an open wound, I bleed, I am afraid I will bleed to death. But what does it matter, then I will be dead too…”

One may of course assume that this couple had had an especially symbiotic marriage, in which the woman had given up her own personality. But one comes across such statements so frequently, that either everyone carries on a symbiotic partnership, or we are so very dependent on those whom we love in the way we experience ourselves that the death then must be experienced as “a huge hole in me,” as a “splintering of my whole personality.”

Whatever the reasons for the death of another influencing our perception of ourselves, the grieving one must in time arrive at a unified conception of himself. In all life situations, it seems necessary that we experience ourselves as being at one with ourselves. It is precisely this fragility of self-awareness in the wake of the loss of someone we love which shows how much the relationship to our fellow humans plays a part in our perception of ourselves. This self-perception is also influenced by the core of the personality, thus connected with one’s own depths or rooted in a deeper Self. Our self-awareness develops not only out of our first real relationships, important though these might be, but out of all of our relationships. The shattering of self-awareness is difficult to cope with. It seems that precisely mourning and the acceptance of the various emotions that are connected with it, the permitting of oneself to be overwhelmed by senselessness, fear and fury, make it possible for a new self-awareness to come into being. Perhaps grief is the emotion that can create a new order in the life of a stunned individual, a new means of experiencing oneself and the world.

In order that mourning can be accepted, in order that grief can really be experienced, which is psychologically necessary in order to surmount the loss and come to a new understanding of oneself and one’s environment, individuals must help one another. Kuhn 9 describes the mourner as feeling like someone who has been expelled from the world: it is not the deceased who is expelled, but the mourner, or, putting it another way, the mourner is expelled along with the deceased. This estrangement has the effect that the mourner then occupies himself excessively with what is past and therefore naturally becomes even more estranged from the real world.

We must find ways to see mourning as something essential, not simply as something pathological, and we must learn again to find ways to mourn with one another. The first step is to overcome our great fear of grief, our tendency to ward it off. In this way we look reality in the eye once again, we experience that we are mortal, that our lives are influenced by many partings, that parting forms part of our being – and that it causes pain. With this also comes the recognition that we are enormously fragile, dependent for our well-being on an endless number of factors which we cannot influence, but at the same time, that we have the capacity to experience and survive grief, that we can experience an extreme situation and be strengthened by it. We must also find new ways to mourn together. We cannot awaken to new life rituals that are no longer valid for us; we will have to find new rituals. Such rituals are, here and there, in the process of being created; apparently we realize that we need them. Schultz 10 writes in his book, Loneliness, that, after the death of his wife, many people were around him for many days and that they talked about the deceased among themselves. This seems to me to be a “ritual” that meets the need of the mourner.

I experienced a completely different approach to a new “ritual” at a meeting in which the psyche and death were discussed. In a large group of approximately 120 persons there developed a very intense discussion of death, loss, fear of death, fear of loss, courage in the face of death. A generalized response was evoked without its being embarrassing. Each could identify when he wished, where he wished, where he had been affected in his encounter with death. At the end of the meeting I had the impression that we had mourned together, perhaps precisely because we were actually “strangers” to one another. We had mourned in an especially good way, because to each it was clear that death is something that really plays a role in every life, that each must deal with it in his own way, and that perhaps precisely where we feel the most lonely, we are not so alone. There are many who are grieving with us, if we would only let them approach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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