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KMID : 0385320050160020142
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2005 Volume.16 No. 2 p.142 ~ p.156
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Loss and Mourning：Letting Go and Mental Development
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Kim Hae-Nam
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Abstract
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Development continues in an active way throughout life. Our psychic structure develops in the realm of interaction with significant others. From the mother’s womb, the fetus is influenced by the mother’s nutritional and psychological state. Phylogenetically born with strong motives for life and development, the baby gradually enlarges his/her understanding of himself/herself and of the world through interaction with the internal and external milieu. In that process, the human mind becomes a kind of inner theatre in which external experiences have meaning and become the sources of psychic development. In relationships with significant others, we come to know who we are and can integrate what we are. But the understanding of ourselves and the world begins when we recognize the gap between ourselves and the world. If our needs were gratified completely, we would not have any any need to understand the meaning of life, and our minds would not develop any further. Everyone experiences loss in the course of a lifetime, both of lovers and of treasures. Sometimes our parents don’t come to us when we need them, and even if they are by our sides, they aren’t complete and have defects. Sometimes we lose one of our parents or siblings. And sometimes we lose a part of our bodies or our ideals. A lifetime is the vicissitude of various looses. Everyone loses and mourns their happy childhoods. Adolescence is the second separation-individuation period of decathecting from parents and moving toward new nonincestous ties. Even after adulthood, we have to cope with many losses. But when we lose something, we also gain something. In that process, we mourn what we lose. Mourning is a kind of adaptational process. In mourning, libido detachment or object decathexis occurs. The task of mourning consists of internal object decathexis with the freeing of energy for later recathexis activities. In the mourning process we internalize the object that we lost, and through this internalization, our psychic apparatuses are structured. The mourning process is the adaptive adjustment of the internal psychic milieu to the altered external milieu. So the capacity to mourn is a necessary element in our development and maturation. It is painful to loose something that is important to us, but to mourn is to let go. It is the bridge connecting the past and the future, the working place of internalization so that our psychic structures and thoughts are formed.
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KEYWORD
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Mourning process, Letting go, Internalization
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