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Essential Papers on Object Loss
This choice collection contains some of the most significant contributions to psychoanalytic and psychological understandingof the effect of object loss on adults and children. Designed for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, this important volume focuses on those contributions most directly relevant to the clinical situation, without neglecting fundamental descriptive and theoretical contributions.
Rita V. Frankiel has culled the literature on object loss and assembled the most salient and conceptually powerful contributions to the field. Each paper is introduced with a brief summary of its contribution to the development of our understanding of object loss. This valuable resource thus provides the serious student of object loss with a ready source of the most important materials on the subject.
Contributors: Karl Abraham, Sol Altschul, John Bowlby, Helene Deutsch, J. Marvin Eisenstadt, George Engel, Joan Fleming, Sigmund Freud, Erna Furman, Robert Furman, Edith Jacobson, Melanie Klein, Paul Lerner, Erich Lindemann, Hans W. Loewald, Marie E. McAnn, George Pollock, Hanna Segal, Chistina Sekaer, Vamik D. Volkan, and Martha Wolfenstein.
Rita V. Frankiel has culled the literature on object loss and assembled the most salient and conceptually powerful contributions to the field. Each paper is introduced with a brief summary of its contribution to the development of our understanding of object loss. This valuable resource thus provides the serious student of object loss with a ready source of the most important materials on the subject.
Contributors: Karl Abraham, Sol Altschul, John Bowlby, Helene Deutsch, J. Marvin Eisenstadt, George Engel, Joan Fleming, Sigmund Freud, Erna Furman, Robert Furman, Edith Jacobson, Melanie Klein, Paul Lerner, Erich Lindemann, Hans W. Loewald, Marie E. McAnn, George Pollock, Hanna Segal, Chistina Sekaer, Vamik D. Volkan, and Martha Wolfenstein.
547 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1994
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December 19, 2023
From Hanna Segal, A Psycho-analytical Approach to Aesthetics
In the last volume of his work, Proust describes how at last he decided to sacrifice the rest of his life to writing. He came back after a long absence to seek his old friends at a party, and all of them appeared to him as ruins of real people he knew -- useless, ridiculous, ill, on the threshold of death. Others, he found, had died long ago. And on realizing the destruction of a whole world that had been his, he decides to write, to sacrifice himself to the re-creation of the dying and the dead. By virtue of his art he can give his objects an eternal life in his work. And since they represent his internal world too, if he can do that, he himself will no longer be afraid of death.
What Proust describes corresponds to a situation of mourning; he sees that his loved objects are dying or dead. Writing a book is for him like the work of mourning in that gradually the external objects are given up, they are re-instated in the ego, and re-created in the book. In her paper "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States," Melanie Klein has shown how mourning in grown-up life is a reliving of the early depressive anxieties ; not only is the present object in the external world felt to be lost, but also the early objects, the parents; and they are lost as internal objects as well as in the external world. In the process of mourning it is these earliest objects which are lost again, and then re-created. Proust describes how this mourning leads to a wish to re-create the lost world.
I have quoted Proust at length because he reveals such an acute awareness of what I believe is present in the unconscious of all artists: namely, that all creation is really a re-creation of a once loved and once whole, but now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self. It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair -- it is then that we must re-create our world anew, re-assemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life.
In the last volume of his work, Proust describes how at last he decided to sacrifice the rest of his life to writing. He came back after a long absence to seek his old friends at a party, and all of them appeared to him as ruins of real people he knew -- useless, ridiculous, ill, on the threshold of death. Others, he found, had died long ago. And on realizing the destruction of a whole world that had been his, he decides to write, to sacrifice himself to the re-creation of the dying and the dead. By virtue of his art he can give his objects an eternal life in his work. And since they represent his internal world too, if he can do that, he himself will no longer be afraid of death.
What Proust describes corresponds to a situation of mourning; he sees that his loved objects are dying or dead. Writing a book is for him like the work of mourning in that gradually the external objects are given up, they are re-instated in the ego, and re-created in the book. In her paper "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States," Melanie Klein has shown how mourning in grown-up life is a reliving of the early depressive anxieties ; not only is the present object in the external world felt to be lost, but also the early objects, the parents; and they are lost as internal objects as well as in the external world. In the process of mourning it is these earliest objects which are lost again, and then re-created. Proust describes how this mourning leads to a wish to re-create the lost world.
I have quoted Proust at length because he reveals such an acute awareness of what I believe is present in the unconscious of all artists: namely, that all creation is really a re-creation of a once loved and once whole, but now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self. It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair -- it is then that we must re-create our world anew, re-assemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life.
August 26, 2021
It was a beautiful experience, reading this book. beside the painful moments, the teary eyes and re-living past memories to it's fullest extent, the whole experience of reading this book is just simply beautiful and transformative in many ways. when you observe the human beings with watchful and empathic eyes, more than often you find similarities between different observers points of view. "we are in the end more human than anything else!"and I've no idea who said this quote. i do recommend this book. because i think all mental problems arises from different ways we try to deal/deny object loss!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews