Psychoanalysis in the process of anticipatory grief: facing death and resignifying life

Abstract

Anticipatory grief designates the psychic and relational processes that arise between the diagnosis of an incurable condition and actual death, constituting an elaboration that begins before the concrete loss. This article examines that process and asks what psychoanalytic listening can offer to the patient, the family and the care team who go through it. The method is a narrative review of the literature, theoretical and conceptual in nature, articulating the Freudian formulation of the work of mourning, Kleinian and Winnicottian contributions on loss and reparation, and the literature on terminality and palliative care. The main descriptive models of grief — stages, phases and tasks — are then compared with regard to the unit each adopts and the clinical implications that follow. It is argued that anticipatory grief is neither a miniature mourning nor an advance payment that subtracts suffering from later mourning, but a time of elaboration with its own economy, marked by the coexistence of the object's physical presence and symbolic absence. The specific contribution of psychoanalysis in this field lies less in intervention protocols than in offering a place of listening that sustains ambivalence and restores to the subject authorship over their own farewell.