Mourning in psychoanalysis: loss, elaboration and symbolisation in Freud, Jung, Horney, Klein, Lacan and Kübler-Ross

Abstract

This article examines how six references within the psychoanalytic field — Freud, Jung, Horney, Klein, Lacan and Kübler-Ross — formulated the problem of mourning, and argues that the notion of loss each mobilises is not restricted to the death of a loved one. The starting point is Freud's 1917 formulation, which defines mourning as psychic work of libidinal detachment governed by reality testing, together with the resulting distinction between mourning and melancholia. Four displacements of this matrix are then traced: the Jungian reading of mourning as a stage of individuation; Horney's emphasis on the cultural modulation of anxiety in the face of loss; the Kleinian thesis of the reactivation of the depressive position and of internal objects; and the Lacanian reformulation of mourning as a hole in the symbolic register, repairable through ritual. Kübler-Ross's stage model is examined separately, as it belongs to a different order of description. Divergences are shown to bear less on the existence of mourning work than on where loss is located — in the object, the ego, the symbol or the social bond — distinct clinical orientations following from that localisation.