Solene DESNOUE; Julie WALLE
Introduction: What happens when a subject loses a close person? What is the internal experience of loss? Through what psychological readjustments does the subject have to go through painfully? This article aims to answer these questions. It is based on a book by Michel Hanus, a well-known french psychiatrist, psychologist and psychoanalyst, who was interested, for much of his life, in the question of death and grief. He was also the founder of the association “Vivre son deuil” in 1995.
Grief is a permanent separation. It is the loss of the object that had been invested with love. The person suffers because he or she had an attachment to the real object that is no longer there. “Without love there is no mourning, there is no grief” (Hanus, 2007, p. 128). In psychoanalysis, the object corresponds to a person, a material object, an event etc… that the subject can invest and internalize in his internal world. In the case of a mourning, the close represent an object of love.
At first, the person refuses or even denies the reality of the loss. It is a regression in which the principle of pleasure takes precedence over the principle of reality. A violent internal conflict develops between the principle of pleasure, which refuses to take into consideration the loss of the object, and the principle of reality, which recognizes this loss. It is a conflict between rebelling or submitting to the principle of reality. Submitting to the meaning of reality forces the subject to rectify his internal representations of the object, to take into account that the persistence of the object in reality is no longer true. The person must therefore do this painful work of rectifying his internal representations of the object now lost.
But in the first instance, the internal representation of the object is first contacted to try to find it since it is impossible to do so in the external reality. The inner world is therefore overinvested since the object is strongly represented in it. By contacting the object psychically, it brings relief. “Thus, at the beginning of mourning, we experience a double movement of reinforced internalization of the relationship with the disappeared and overinvestment of his internal representations” (Hanus, 2007, p. 147). But quickly, the person realizes that the object is indeed lost in the external reality and this causes suffering. This alternation between relief and suffering makes it possible to gradually accept reality while reinforcing the internalization of the relationship with the object.
In addition to regression, which sets aside the principle of reality for a time, “narcissistic regression is at the very heart of the grieving process” (Hanus, 2007, p. 138). Indeed, the objectal investment we have described above is, in the case of loss, broken and a large part of the investment energy returns to the self. There’s a drive detachment. When the object was still there, the subject had invested it with both loving, tender and sensual desires but also with aggressive desires. All these investments were related to the object. The loss causes the drive-like unbinding of these different desires. It is for this reason that temporarily, these desires will be located on the self before being able to be invested again elsewhere. The aggressiveness, which was until then linked to the object, is now directed towards the self since the object is no longer there. It can be directed towards the internalized object because it must be felt good enough to be preserved. Moreover, directing this aggressiveness towards the interiorized object would cause an increase in guilt that is already quite high enough by the fact that the person feels responsible for the death of the loved object. Indeed, the ambivalent feelings linked to the object also included wishes for death, at least unconscious. Concerning affectionate investments, they too, turn on the self and make people suffer by their libidinal overload.
In situations where the mourning is going well, positive and negative investments temporarily directed at the self can gradually detach themselves from it. The person gradually shifts from this primary narcissistic identification to the lost object. “In the secondary narcissistic identification, which is thus the identification of mourning, the qualities, value, values of the object itself and even more so the quotient of ambivalence that existed in the relationship maintained with it come into play” (Hanus, 2007, p. 149). Thus, and gradually, the internal representation of the lost object can be transformed into a new identification by taking into account the external reality.
Bibliographical reference:
Hanus, M. (2007). Le travail de deuil : le vécu intérieur de la perte. Dans Les deuils dans la vie : deuils et séparations chez l’adulte et chez l’enfant (3e éd., pp. 127-158). Paris: Maloine.
Words we have learnt:
grief = deuil/chagrin/affliction, mourning = deuil, , to set aside = mettre de côté, drive = pulsion; overload = surcharge,