On Hating Freud’s Injunction to Give Up Loving Those We Have Lost

In Freud’s groundbreaking 1914 essay “On Narcissism,” he

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writes, “A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love” (S.E., Vol. 14, p. 85). That statement has always moved me, both for its insights into the psychology of love and for its magisterial prose rhythms, which are evident even in translation. Ever since I began reading Freud in college, I have admired his deep understanding of love and loss: his recognition of the importance of love for a fulfilling life, his realization that love can dissolve easily and violently into hate, and his definition of psychological health as the ability to love and work. Freud has always been a heroic figure to me: his intellectual courage in the face of adversity, his wry characterization of himself as a “disturber of the world’s sleep,” his refusal to be silenced by his many critics, his extraordinary work ethic, his determination to pursue the truth no matter where it might lead (he chose as the motto for The Interpretation of Dreams a quotation from The Aeneid: “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions”), and his acceptance of a tragic vision of life. Nothing in life could break his spirit, not even the early death of his daughter Sophie in 1920 followed by the death in 1923 of her four-year-old son Heinz, to whom Freud was so attached. According to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, Heinz’s death “was the only occasion in his life when Freud was known to shed tears” (Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 3 [London: Hogarth Press, 1957], p. 92).

For more than 30 years I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses on literature and psychoanalysis at my university, never failing to point out both the insights and blindness of Freudian theory. I had no criticisms of his theory of bereavement, however, until the death of my beloved wife, Barbara, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer on April 5, 2004, at the age of 57. When I began studying Freud’s observations on bereavement, in an attempt to understand my own dark, turbulent emotions, and my need to keep Barbara’s memory alive by talking about her to my students, discussing her at professional conferences, and writing books about

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her that focus on death education, I found myself becoming angrier and angrier. The more I read Freud, the more I disagreed with his conclusions on bereavement—a disagreement so strong that it approaches furious dissent. Is my new “hatred” of Freud’s theory of bereavement impassioned, honest disagreement, or is it clinical resistance—an example of protesting too much? You be the judge.

One of Freud’s most important statements on loss appears in his 1916 essay “On Transience,” where he states in his most emphatic language that mourners must detach themselves from their lost loved one. “Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious” (S.E., Vol. 14, p. 307). Freud was no less unambiguous in arguing, in his justly famous 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” that to avoid depression, the living must give up all connection with the dead. “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (S.E., Vol. 14, p. 244). This withdrawal of libido or “decathexis” of energy, is necessary so that the “ego becomes free and uninhibited again.” Otherwise, Freud warns, using one of his most suggestive metaphors, the “shadow of the object” will fall upon the ego, resulting in depression.

Freud views bereavement in terms of his early libido theory, not in terms of the internal system of object relations (love relations) theorized by later psychoanalysts. I suspect that he found the psychology of mourning as enigmatic as he did the psychology of women. To his credit, he did not pathologize grief, but he felt that it disappeared quickly in “normal” mourning. In his Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), better known as the story of the Rat Man, Freud tells his patient that “a normal period of mourning would last from one year to two years” (S.E., Vol. 10, p. 186). He conceded in “Mourning and Melancholia” that “people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a

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substitute is already beckoning to them,” but he nevertheless concluded that “[n]ormally, respect for reality gains the day” (S.E., Vol. 14, p. 244). The “work of mourning” occurs when “[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (S.E., Vol. 14, p. 245)—like erasing a computer’s hard drive of all its data.

For decades clinicians have accepted Freud’s view of mourning. For example, in the first edition of Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy (New York: Springer, 1982), J. William Worden agrees with Freud and lists one of the “Tasks of Mourning” as “withdrawing emotional energy from the deceased and reinvesting it in another relationship.” In the third edition (New York: Springer, 2002), however, Worden reverses himself and concludes that Freud was mistaken about the mourner’s need to shatter the relational bond with the deceased. “We now know that people do not decathect from the dead but find ways to develop ‘continuing bonds’ with the deceased” (p. 35). Worden now suggests, contrary to Freud, that one of the tasks of mourning “is to find a place for the deceased that will enable the mourner to be connected with the deceased but in a way that will not preclude him or her from getting on with life. We need to find ways to memorialize the dead, that is, to remember the dead loved one—keeping them with us but still going on with life” (p. 35).

Other contemporary theorists and clinicians agree with Worden’s new position. For example, Stephen Shuchter and Sidney Zisook argue that it is not only undesirable but also impossible for many people to break their attachments with the dead. “The continued emotional or spiritual existence of the dead spouse becomes one of the most powerful means of containing the potentially overwhelming emotions of grief.” The task of mourning, they conclude, is to “find a way of continuing the relationship with their dead spouse that allows both an ‘appropriate’ experience of grief and a continuing involvement in living” (“Treatment of Spousal Bereavement,” published in Psychiatric Annals [1986], p. 303).

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Psychoanalytically oriented clinicians have adopted a new paradigm of mourning, one that recognizes, as Marilyn McCabe explains in her book The Paradox of Loss: Toward a Relational Theory of Grief (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), “both that the lost other is an ongoing part of our existence, and that the processes of relationship continue to be reintegrated, transferred, rejuvenated, and transformed. These relational processes are part of a verbal and nonverbal, tacit and conscious narrative that helps us reconstruct our selves and our lives in the experience of profound loss” (p. 13; emphasis in original).

In light of this new view of bereavement, my need to talk about Barbara and write books about death education reflects my desire to hold onto her, to maintain rather than renounce my relationship with her. I don’t want to “decathect” from her but to develop my continuing bond with her. Contrary to Freud, my mourning did not come to a “spontaneous end” in one or two years. Barbara died nearly five years ago, and I am still in mourning. Nevertheless, I experience the many joys of life as a parent, grandparent, teacher, and friend. I cannot imagine that I will discover a substitute who will “replace the lost object”—no one can replace Barbara, though I hope that I will find another woman whom I can love, which was something that my wife also wished for me as she lay dying.

If Freud were alive, I suspect he would understand and endorse this new view of mourning and bereavement, for there was one love that he could never renounce, even when his own death loomed, something that was not a person but a new way of looking at human reality—psychoanalysis, his own offspring, which he never doubted would survive and prosper long after the creator’s death. All of us have different foci for our love, be they people, pets, God, or ideas. We cannot and should not be asked to let them go when they or we are on the brink of extinction. One need not believe in a supernatural afterlife to recognize that we are less alone when we internalize our loved ones and hold onto them for dear life.

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