Mourning the Dead, Mourning the Disappeared:

The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

Prague 2013

Introduction
The loss of beloved ones by death is an inevitable aspect of life and occurs to all of
us. Freuds interest in the impact of death on the living goes back further than
Mourning and Melancholia (1917e, [1915]); in Totem and Taboo (1912-13) Freud
noted the ambivalence of emotions we experience in connection to the dead. 1 In
this presentation, I focus on Freuds Mourning and Melancholia as a landmark in
the understanding of both the normal and psychopathological aspects of mourning
and the depressive process in human beings. Mourning and Melancholia bridges
Freuds first and second topographic theories of the psychic apparatus and
constitutes for many authors the foundation of his theory of internal object
relations.
The purpose of this presentation is twofold. The first part will describe the
contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of loss and the process of
mourning, which may result in successful mourning or the failure to mourn. With
this psychoanalytic understanding of mourning as a framework, in the second part
of this paper I discuss the special mourning processes such as the one
confronted by psychoanalysts in Argentina when treating the relatives of
thousands of disappeared persons; the processes are special in the sense that
the external reality [which] constitutes the starting point of the psychic mourning
process, as described by Freud, is absent.2
Mourning and Melancholia is considered to be one of Freuds most
important meta-psychological papers, not only for its remarkable conceptual link
to our understanding of mourning and depression, but also because it grants a
place to external reality and objects in the psychic life of the individual. But like
most of Freuds writings, this contribution cannot be read as an isolated piece of
work; we need to take into account its place in the evolution of his thinking over
more than four decades. This care is not often taken, and although in recent years
there has been an upsurge of interest in the mourning process and its treatments
in psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic authors alike, it is often used without

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The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

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placing it in a comprehensive meta-psychological context which helps us

understand its significance.3

i.

Death and the Work of Mourning

Death, or as Freud wrote, the great Unknown, the gravest of all misfortunes, is
present in many of his texts. However, it is important to note that in the Freudian
unconscious we do not know death; in our unconscious we are immortal. The
question of death, in the sense that we are all subject to its enigma, it is not primal
for psychoanalysis. Jean Laplanche expressed this very point in his interview with
Cathy Caruth in 1993:
We all know that infants up to a certain point in their development don't
know death and don't have any questions about death. [] I would say that
the question of the enigma of death is brought to the subject by the other.
That is, it is the other's death that raises the question of death. Not the
existentialist question, why should I die? The question, why should I
die? is secondary to the question, why should the other die?, why did
the other die?4
Typically, we experience the death of the other before we encounter our own.
Indeed, to experience the permanent absence of the other requires us to disinvest,
that is divesting at the psychic level the representation of the other as an internal
possession. This process presents us with a complex and challenging experience,
reminiscent of and isomorphic in structure to early developmental losses. By loss, I
mean the internal object psychic reality, which could be related to a real, a
symbolic, or a fantasized loss.5
Freud titled Chapter Two of his book Totem and Taboo Taboo and
Emotional Ambivalence. In it, he discusses how the prohibitions imposed by
ancient taboos concerned actions for which there existed in humans a strong
desire. Thus, in spite of taboo prohibitions, the original pleasure to do the
forbidden continues in the unconscious, according to Freud, mostly as a conflict
which results in an ambivalent attitude toward taboo prohibitions. As Freud
argued, In their unconscious there is nothing they would like more than to violate

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The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

Prague 2013

them, but they are afraid to do so; they are afraid precisely because they would
like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire.6 Later in the same chapter, Freud
examines in particular the ambivalence of emotions in mourners. He starts the
section Taboo of the Dead with the following sentence: We know that the dead
are powerful rulers; but we may perhaps be surprised when we learn that they are
treated as enemies.7 He then sets himself to understand why and how in early
cultures the dead loved one becomes a demon of sorts. After describing the
treatment of the dead and the prohibitions therein in several geographically
unconnected cultural groups, he concludes that these practices make no disguise
of the fact that they are afraid of the presence or of the return of the dead
persons ghost; and they perform a great number of ceremonies to keep him at a
distance or drive him off. 8
Freud speculated that the ambivalence is supported by an unconscious
conflict between the loving and hostile emotions towards the dead loved one. The
taboo of the dead, he adds, originates from the opposition between the conscious
grief and the unconscious satisfaction at death. Furthermore, the repression of
the unconscious hostility by the method of projection and the construction of the
ceremonial, gives expression to the fear of being punished by the demons. 9
The mourner resolves this conflict by projecting out the hostile aspects of his
conflict on to the dead spirit in the form of a malignant persecutory object. Freud
succeeded, as it were, in getting behind the demons, for [he] explained them as
projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors against the dead.10 This
process, which in early cultures is embodied primarily in cultural practices and
rituals, is later internalized as the psychological process of mourning and gives rise
to a specific process of internal object relations, which is primarily psychological
and described for the first time in Mourning and Melancholia.
By transforming these cultural practices into primarily psychological
processes, modern man dispenses of demons, but not his ambivalence. If this
unknown hostility, of which we are ignorant and of which we do not wish to

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The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

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know, is not projected from our inner perceptions into the outer world, and [is]
thereby detached from our own person and attributed to other,11 where does it
go if it is not deposited onto the external demon? If the mourner does not defend
himself against it by displacement upon the object of hostility, namely the
dead,12 as a projection, how is this hostility worked through, and how does the
mourner resolve the ambivalence? And furthermore, what psychological processes
engage this ambivalence? In response to these questions, Freud conceived of the
work of mourning primarily as a psychological process by introducing, in embryonic
form, the theory of object relations.13
In psychoanalytic terms, mourning has a very distinct psychic task to
perform, namely, to detach the memories and libidinal investment of the survivors
from the dead; this process is, according to Freud, generated under the influence
of the reality test, which categorically demands separation from the object
because the latter no longer exists.14 Or, in the radical words of French
psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache, The purpose of the work of mourning is to kill the
dead.15
This psychological killing is in Freuds opinion not voluntary; it is an
automatic process. The process of mourning manifests itself in several ways, such
as in feelings of grief, withdrawal from the outside world, or an indifference to love
and work interests. The individual faces a painful struggle in his attempt to
acknowledge the reality of the loss. In other words, the mourner disinvests himself
of the external world and intensifies his psychic investment in his internal world in
an effort to keep the object alive. This unwillingness to abandon the libidinal
investment in the object is the normal initial response to the loss of the object. The
detachment of libido from the lost object requires time and takes place bit by bit
as the mourner brings to psychic life the memories of the loved one and slowly
relinquishes the ties to the original object. This process transforms the ego, in the
sense that during the initial denial of the loss of the object, the effort to keep it
cathected is accompanied by a splitting of the ego. The mourners ego is faced

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with a highly cathected mental representation of the loved object on the one hand
and with the absence of physical and emotional perceptions of the object on the
other. The splitting is a compromise that acknowledges both realities. 16 As the
mourner temporarily hallucinates the object through reminiscences, he has to
acknowledge at the same time that acts of love can no longer be exchanged with
the absent object.
After some time, Freud tells us, [n]ormally, respect for reality gains the
day.17 Over time the reality of the objects loss is accepted. Through the process
of reality testing and memory, the denial of the loss comes to an end and the
person works through his loss. However, it is here that Freud turns his attention to
melancholia as a form of pathological mourning. James Strachey, in his editors
note of the Standard Edition, remarked that what Freud seems later to have
regarded as the most significant feature of this paper was, [however], its account
of the process by which in melancholia an object-cathexis is replaced by
identification. 18

ii. Melancholia, or When Loving the Object Implies Being the Object
Freud considered melancholia also a reaction to loss, either real or imagined. 19 The
question according to Jean-Michel Quinodoz is why do some people respond with
the affect we call mourning, which will be overcome after a certain time, while
others sink into depressionthe syndrome Freud called melancholia?20 Both
mourner and melancholic, psychoanalysis proposes, react to an object loss by
effecting a temporary introjection of the object, but the intensity of the
unconscious ambivalence as discussed above determines a normal or pathological
outcome. Introjection means that in phantasy, the subject transposes the object
and its inherent qualities from the outside to the inside of himself.21 In
psychoanalysis, introjection is close in meaning to incorporation, identification
and opposite of projection, as specified above.22

Mourning the Dead, Mourning the Disappeared:

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Prague 2013

Fenichel has observed that mourning consisted of two acts: the first being
the establishment of an introjection, the second the loosening of the binding to
the introjected object.23 Significantly, this second act occurs differently in the
melancholic. Freud argued that the pathological condition of melancholia, which
involves a permanent disturbance in ones self-regard, provides a clue to how the
process is different. In the melancholic, the introjected object becomes part of the
ego through identification of one part of the ego with the lost object. This
narcissistic object relation characterizes the melancholic experience. Through an
ego identification with the introjected object, the melancholic gives up part of his
ego and introjects the object, which is referred to as the narcissistic identification
with the object. The melancholic thus experiences an ego loss, not an object loss,
and reacts with ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards the incorporated
object. Rather than a gradual loosening of the binding to the object, the
melancholic resolves the ambivalence towards the lost object by turning against
himself the hostility he feels towards the object. In this way he does not have to
resolve the ambivalence, but makes the object part of his ego; in other words, he
does not lose the object but it assigns it the hostility which from then on is
deployed towards the loving ego. The ambivalence of feelings towards the dead
and the rage the mourner feels towards the lost object can occur in the early
stages of normal mourning too. However, whereas in normal mourning the
individual manages to loosen the bonds with the introjected object and separate it
from his own self, in the pathological condition of melancholia the identification of
one part of the self with the object persists and can lead to self-hatred and selfdestruction. Lipson remarked that By linking mourning and melancholia and
exploring them simultaneously [Freud] could discern that the nature of ones
reaction to the loss of a loved object depends upon the prior relation to that
object. 24
This additional element that appears in melancholia, i.e. an extraordinary
diminution in self-esteem, does not occur in mourning: In mourning it is the world

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The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

Prague 2013

which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself; there is a
fundamental difference between normal and pathological mourningone that
originates in the change of the direction taken by libidinal cathexes. 25 In normal
mourning, the individual is able to give up the lost object and withdraw libido
from it, so that this libido, now free, can attach itself to a new object. In
melancholia, however, the individual does not withdraw libido from the lost
object: the ego devours the object in fantasy in order not to separate from it, in
order to be as one with the object (narcissistic identification):
Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could
henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the
forsaken object. In this way an object loss was transformed into an ego-loss
and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage
between the critical acerbity of the ego and the ego as altered by
identification.26
This turning back of accusations onto the individual implies a split in the ego: one
part merges with the lost object while the other criticizes the patient and sets itself
up as an agency which Freud calls conscience. As Freud writes, We see how in
him one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critical, and as it
were, takes it as its object.27 This concept foreshadows the critical agency of the
super-ego developed by Freud after the war.28
The individual thus faces a painful struggle in his attempt to acknowledge
the reality of loss. Etymologically this understanding of struggle is present in the
Spanish word for mourning, duelo, which has two Latin roots: a) dolus or pain,
and b) duellum or duel. This second root, meaning combat between two persons,
is in turn derived from two words, duo, meaning two, and bellum, meaning
war.29 Etymologically speaking, then, mourning is pain that arises from combat
between two people at war. Translated into psychoanalytical terms, this combat is
between the two sides of a split ego: in mourning, between the introjected object
and his own self, and in melancholia, between the ego being the object and the
ego as object of the critical agency.

Mourning the Dead, Mourning the Disappeared:

The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

Prague 2013

With this psychoanalytic understanding of mourning and melancholia as

framework, I will discuss now special mourning processes, such as those
confronted by Argentinian psychoanalysts treating relatives of the thousands of
disappeared persons; they are special in the sense that the external reality
[which] constitutes the starting point of the psychic mourning process as
described by Freud, was absent.30

iii. Mourning the Disappeared

According to Freud, confirming the loss of external reality constitutes the
starting point of the psychic mourning process. The stimulus at the onset of the
mourning process is the sudden disinvestment of the libido from the object to the
self since the longed-for object is in reality absent. This process, which involves a
rather slow and sustained reality-testing, as in the case of the disappeared
persons in Argentina, was absent because the external reality did not offer
evidence of death but only of sudden disappearance; the absence of the body was
fully enigmatic. For those left behind, it was impossible to know why the persons
had been abducted, where the loved ones were, what they were being submitted
to, whether they were alive or dead, and, if they had been murdered, where the
remains were. 31 In addition, the very act of searching for information was
dangerous.
First a brief account of the historical period. In Argentina, the turbulent
decade of the 1970s culminated in a bloody dictatorship installed by a military
coup in 1976. This regime lasted seven years and during this period thousands of
individuals died or disappeared; others were forced into exile, and those who
remained were subjected to rigid censorship. A forced disappearance occurred
when a person was secretly abducted or imprisoned by the paramilitary forces
with the authorization and support of the state, followed by an official refusal to
acknowledge the persons fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the
victim outside the protection of the law.32 Yet forced disappearance implied

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Prague 2013

murder and, in almost all cases, torture; when the victim was killed the body was
destroyed or hidden. The corpse was disposed of in such a way as to prevent it
ever being found, so that the person apparently vanished. Since there was no body
to prove that the victim had actually died, the reality of their fate was held in
suspension.
Those who survived and were direct witnesses of the repressive system
speak, in the trials presently being conducted in Argentina, of the mechanism of
kidnapping and torture as organized activities. Clandestine detention centres were
administrated bureaucratically through the use of special forms put in files which
contained the information of each victim, including information obtained under
torture. The coincidence among the testimonies of the survivors provided evidence
that the system, although displaying some autonomy according to regions, was
similar in all of the centres and that it was not a matter of isolated occurrences.
During this period not only armed subversives were killed but many
political dissidents such as journalists, students, writers, filmmakers, artists,
physicians and psychologists, all of whom were illegally detained or abducted and
hidden in clandestine detention centres where they were questioned, tortured and
sometimes killed.33 Whenever female captives gave birth, their children were
taken away immediately upon delivery and secretively given to military families. It
is estimated that there were 500 children either kidnapped together with their
parent or born in clandestine centres and then appropriated.
Many of the illegally detained were heavily drugged and taken on airplanes
far out over the Atlantic Ocean, into which they were thrown alive, with heavy
weights tied to their feet. The hallmark of their operations was secrecy and the
destruction of the body; without any dead bodies, the government could easily
deny any knowledge of the captives whereabouts and any accusations that they
had been killed. People murdered in this way are today referred to as the
disappeared (los desaparecidos), and this is where the modern usage of the term
derives.34

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Prague 2013

The unfinished business between the living and the dead is not an inert
affair; far from lifeless, the representation of the dead/disappeared haunts the
mind with a restless spectral presence, the absent body of the disappeared
creating an internalized presence. The dead inhabit the minds of the living and the
absence of body haunts the subject who is unable to bury the dead once and for
all, either physically or psychologically. Dead and alive at the same time, the
dead/disappeared do not cease to impinge on the world of the living. This state of
affairs creates a subject in a state of refusal to mourn, and latent mourning at the
same time. Foreclosed from the process by which grief is overcome, the mourner
continues to experience the traumatic loss of the other and of the self. Given the
uncertain presence of the dead/disappeared, the process of exploring the internal
presence of what no longer exists is barred from taking place. This means that in
the case of the relatives of the disappeared, they are also unable to experience the
presence of what does not yet exist: in the words of Emmanuel Levinas, the
awaited certainty that death is the without-response. 35
Levinas considers death a fundamental relation with the other: Because I
am invested with responsibility for the other, the death of the other is necessarily
my affair. 36 Levinas describes the self as the survivor of the death of the other,
and as such continues to be determined by the relationship with the deceased. At
the same time, death he affirms puts an end to the others capacity to make me
the addressee of its signifying acts, so that, as already quoted, Death is the
without-response. 37 But, yet, like the ghost of Hamlets father, who knows a
secret to be revealed, or a wrongdoer to be apprehended, the disappeared body
is now inside the mind of those who knew him as well as roaming the outside
world rather than resting in a silent grave; their subjectivity is permeated by a
spectral presence.38
Such enigmatic mourning is a riddle that presents the indeterminacy of an
oracle and launches the mourner in a labyrinthic experience paced and designed
by the other. Significantly, this other is not only the disappeared loved, but also the

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regime. The enigma speaks from two constituencies, that is, it has two addresses
towards the same addressee: the disappearance of the loved one, with the
personal and intimate love for the disappeared, including all the longing, regret
and possible idealization of the loved-disappeared; and the perverse violence of
the regime. These cruel and sadistic actions remain for the relative of the
disappeared in the domain of the imaginary, hyper-activating the fantasy of
sadistic perversion of the invisible perpetrators of the state. The mourner of the
disappeared is thus like an infant elaborating the primal scene in the darkness of
his room by filling in the gaps of understanding of the violent movements behind
the wall.
If the disappearance is an implanted enigma, it carries a secret, a mystery,
and the case could be made that is isomorphic to the enigmatic signifier proposed
by Jean Laplanche in his reformulation of Freuds seduction theory. Laplanche
argued that Freuds seduction theory is a truly general theory of the origins of the
repressed unconscious. That is, it is more than a mere etiological hypothesis about
neurotic symptoms; it tells us how the unconscious comes into being. In describing
the subjective and intersubjective beginnings of mental life, Laplanche theorizes that
the encounter with the enigmatic signifier of the first other, typically the mother,
initiates the creation of the unconscious. The message transmitted by the adult first
other (caregiver) is a key first encounter. For Laplanche, this encounter it is not
limited to forms of somatic contact between the adult and the child, it has a
communicative function and goes beyond a matter of simple excitations of the
erotogenic zones, to include the contribution of fantasy on the part of the adult.
39

Laplanche insists on the fact that the adult-infans dialogue, as reciprocal as it

may be, is nevertheless parasited by something else, from the beginning. The adult
message is scrambled; by the unconscious of the adult.40 The adult-infans
situation, in spite of its reciprocity, is asymmetrical on the sexual plane, in the sense
that on the side of the adult there is a unilateral intervention by the unconscious

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as the result of the reactivation of unconscious drives that the adult-infans situation
brings about. 41
The infant, according to Laplanche, is the recipient of the
conscious/preconscious messages of the parents which are accompanied by the
parental unconscious [which] is like the noise in the sense of communication
theorythat comes to perturb and to compromise the conscious/preconscious
message. 42 The polymorphous perverse potentiality of the adult is interpellated
by the caring of the infant.43 Discussing Laplanche, Dominique Scarfone explained
in an interview that attachment is more than mere connection,
Laplanche insists on one aspect that could easily be missed
by a purely empirical observation, and that is the sexual contaminant,
so to speak: the sexual, covert aspect that travels as a clandestine
passenger within the otherwise well-adapted messages of attachment. 44
The intrusive impact of the adult other is always traumatic, and her (or his)
message always in need of decoding; this is, in Laplanches words, our
fundamental anthropological situation. This first message remains initially
unintepreted or unassimilated and persists in the form of the question: what does
the other want of me? Against this message, interiority was first created; as
Laplanche writes, the ego was [first] formed to cope with the strangeness of the
message. 45
Following this reasoning, the extended notion of seduction proposed by
Laplanche applies, I argue, to the situation encountered by the survivor who is
unable and as unequipped as the infant, to process the absence full of
communication he encounters. Once the disappearance has taken place, the body
of the loved one does not respond and this situation is not different from normal
mourning, i.e. exchanges are not possible. However, the non-response of the body
leaves behind the third reality of the enigmatic message.46 Laplanche speaks of
the enigmatic message as a third reality between mother and infant. This
interaction is not equal; it is a perplexing and impenetrable implicit
communication that is overloaded with significance [for the infant and the adult].

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Such messages implant themselves as foreign bodies, haunting questions in the

childs psyche.47
Laplanche distinguishes the enigma from the riddle. The enigma can only
be proposed by someone who does not master the answer, in our case the
disappeared, and the addressee receives a message that is a compromiseformation in which the unconscious of the other takes part. And crucially, the
otherness of the other, his response to his own unconscious, is in fact otherness
to himself. 48 Paradoxically, the enigma was also a riddle in our case, planted by
the regime, in the sense that the abductors knew the answer but not the survivor.
Laplanche expands on the internalization of otherness: Far from being my
kernel, it is the other implanted in me, the metabolised product of the other in me:
forever an internal foreign body. 49 In the case of the disappeared, it is an
internal foreign body who asks the survivor: What does the disappeared want of
me? The search is the place for the message of the other; it is where he gets to
hear the message of the disappeared. What would he have said/done now? The
function of the enigma is then to allow the presence of the absence to speak.
The problem of the absent-present reality of the other and his message is
what faces the survivor as a potential mourner. How does the survivor encounter
the strange message of the disappeared loved one? He is confronted with a
message from the other for which he has no previous experience, except that it reanimates the original invasion of the compromised message of the adult person
who cared for the survivor and against whom the ego was formed (in order to cope
with the strangeness of the message). Simultaneously, the intense search for the
disappeared becomes a form of caring and it reproduces, in the case of parents,
the past caring for the infant, now a defenceless disappeared.50
At the origin, according to Laplanche, the message is implanted but not
yet processed, and to process it, that is to translate it, the ego has to build itself as
a structure. 51 In this sense the enigmatic signifier is always traumatic, for it
exceeds the ability of the subject to symbolize it.

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I postulate that the survivors of the disappeared have to do this work.

Similar to the original founding of the ego, they must build an ego structure that
can bind this new unknown enigmatic message, one that creates for the ego a new
position that circulates around the enigmatic message of the disappeared. The ego
is taken over by the traumatic invasion of the enigma that needs to be decoded. In
this case, it is an absence full of communication, and in this translation, to use
Laplanches term, the ego is transformed.52
The special mourning process, in short, is in essence an unresolved
ambivalence to this attack of the enigmatic message. The enigma demands the
questionwhy this? Why did this happen to me? How do I create ways to
symbolize this? Since the reality of the disappearance itself is equivocal and
deliberately ambiguous as to why and by whom this act has been executed,
reality cant gain the day; the purpose of the work of mourningto kill the
deadis thus suspended.
Although the survivor as potential or latent mourner of the disappeared
faces a highly cathected mental representation of the loved object on the one
hand and the absence of physical and emotional perceptions of the object on the
other, the split of the ego does not consist of a compromise that eventually
acknowledges both realities, as mentioned above in the description of normal
mourning. Only as a first reaction, in the case of the relative of the disappeared, is
the survivors response similar to normal mourning. One side of the split is the
denial of the disappearance as final, and on the other the initiation of an intense
internal cathexis to memories and reminiscences in search of clues. As time goes
by the split continues and the survivor experiences the pull between two
contradictory aims. One the one hand, to acknowledge the tugging force of life,
there is the need to grant the actual status to the disappeared, to accept the
disappearance as final and give up the effort to translate the enigma. On the other
hand, the ego is compelled to continue an intense internal psychic investment in
memories and reminiscences in search of clues to sustain the frenetic, devoted and

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relentless external search with all its dead ends, false clues and red herrings. The
acceptance of the disappearance thus brings about profound feelings of guilt,
shame and inadequacy; the enigma is repressed and can in extreme cases become
a psychotic persecutory enclave.53 The continuation of the search increasingly
constitutes a quest that drains the psychic energy of the survivor into a lifeless
state, since he fails to get rid of an internal persecutory thanatic object that is
opposed to pleasure and to life. 54 Thus, love and hate, veneration and hostility
arise out of the others disappearance.55
The reasons and manner of the disappearance received passionate
speculation and were in constant flux; therefore, it was impossible to approximate
a truth that would constitute a stable reality for the survivor. Multiple and
contradictory versions circulated, and sometimes distorted or inaccurate messages
were deliberately and anonymously given on the telephone by the paramilitary.
These telephonic messages would tell the relatives of the disappeared he or she
was dead and describe the details of the tortures they underwent. Or sometimes, a
few months later, a telephone call would tell them he or she was alive but they
would not see him or her again. Thus, the enigma persisted. Marked by a
senseless, disorienting and menacing complexity, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy
enveloped the lives of the survivors on a daily basis as they spent countless hours
in line-ups and waiting rooms in police stations, military headquarters, hospitals,
morgues and Federal department officesonly to find no answers to their queries.
Their constant and relentless search often resulted in travelling extensive distances
in the hope of finding a piece of information that would allow them to make sense
of the enigma.56 As time progressed, the burden of the search began to morph into
an internal persecutory object, a representation of the disappeared, as all these
humiliating and frustrating experiences began to be associated with the
internalized loved object; this psychic dynamic following idiosyncratic vicissitudes.
Sonia, a patient of Maria Lucila Pelento, an Argentinean psychoanalyst who
among her patients had many relatives of the disappeared, said in one session: If I

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go ahead with this infernal search, Ill go mad and be unable to go on with my life,
but if I stopits as if I have left him aloneworse than alone, actually Id leave
him surrounded by monsters.57 In one of Sonias dreams, Ral, her disappeared
partner, gave her directions on the route to follow, with one peculiarity: he was
pushing her. In her associations with the dream, Sonia felt someone pushing her
to go on looking for information without a map, violence was being done to
her.58 Pelento said that Sonia, after an interview with someone who once again
refused to provide information after promising they would, dreamed that she was
driving a car and couldnt get out of a tunnel: each time the car seemed to get
close to the exit, some sort of vines stuck to the car, trapping it, so it couldnt
moveShe couldnt come out of the car either, because when she tried, the
creepers surrounded and suffocated her. When she awoke from this dream she
was feeling extreme anxiety. For Sonia, Pelento tells us, accepting that Ral was
dead was equivalent to killing him, experienced as leaving him helpless
supported by the universal fact that, for the unconscious, the issue of death is
indissolubly linked to the death-wishas well as an imaginary identification with
the murderous State. 59 These internal images intensified when the Military
Junta was brought to trial in 1985, and the voices of surviving witnesses were
heard for the first time describing the torture that had been inflicted on them. At
the time, Sonia said, I was never particularly fearful, neither as a small girl nor as a
grown-up, but this is differentI dont know how to escape from some of the
horrible images that haunt mesometimes I see Ral being beaten, freezing and
hungry. But suddenly, these images change to a kind of monster, with a horrible
grimace. 60
Instead of speaking less and less of the one who is not with us anymore, the
survivor speaks about him more and more, to the point of neglecting the living.
That part of the message that can only be apprehended in his absence leaves a
linguistic internal presence which speaks and demands to be heard. His absence
implants his message at the centre of the ego of the survivor, which orbits around

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its absent-presence. The mourner constructs a meticulous and obsessive archive

of the disappeareds actions, live events and words, which are repeated and
circulated with the currency of the living. This continuous reference to the
disappeared as alive and not dead sets up a space of non-mourning, which
functions as a constant petition for a writ to habeas corpus, i.e. to produce the
disappeared alive or face the court of law.
If mourning is a kind of work, the work of memory that produces a new
tapestry, it is also an effort that results in a new version of the person who is no
more. In this sense, we do not only detach the libido from the object; we modify
the object by this work. What the mourning process opens up is the opportunity to
access an aspect of the original enigma, an aspect only possible to disentangle and
untie when the presence of the absence gains psychological manifestation. But
there is no resolution for the survivor of the disappeared, as the entanglement of
all the searching threads are not untied or detached from the libido.61 He
unweaves in his search, but unweaving brings him back to a circular cloth
resembling a maze with a hidden exit. No new fabric can be woven that
accomplishes a disentanglement allowing for new knots and new meanings, which
will help him mourn the dead-loved-one.62
Freud remarked that the loss of the love-object is an excellent opportunity
of the ambivalence in loverelationship to make itself effective and come into the
open. 63 A traumatic experience in connection with the object, such as a sudden
disappearance, may activate other repressed material, particularly when the
survivor is confronted with the impossible situation of not being able to give up the
love for the object nor the object itself. In contradistinction to normal mourning,
the search for the object demands an increased psychic investment; the body of
the object, which is in this case absent, is hallucinated in order to keep it alive.
Simultaneously, and similar to melancholia, the love of the object takes refuge in a
narcissistic identification with the object, the ego incorporating the disappeared
object into itself as a way to bring it back.64 In Freuds words, by taking flight into

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the ego, love escapes extinction, thereby resolving the ambivalence for the
object.65 The search for the object becomes the love for the object and a way to
keep it cathected. Mothers, spouses and siblings of the disappeared became
internally consumed by the disappeared as though the disappeared had devoured
them. Disposition to fall ill varies in degree according to the predominance of the
narcissistic type of object-choice because the object as perfectly benevolent and
fundamentally hostile at one and the same time [is] intolerable, so the subject
struggles against his predicament by splitting it into a good and a bad object. 66
This split along a natural weakness of the ego elaborated by Freud, is more than
just a rendering apart. The other meaning of cleavage is to adhere closely, to stick
or cling to by remaining faithful, such as in the phrase to cleave to ones principles
in spite of persecution. Therefore, cleavage means both to split love from hate
and to stick them to a surface or agency. 67 This clinging by remaining faithful, i.e.
substituting the love-object with an identification, occurred as a way to keep the
object breathing when the object psychic disinvestment is not called upon, since
the reality principle of the dead body did not initiate the mourning process. As in
melancholia, part of the ego remains faithful to the love through identification,
while the other part of the ego takes charge of the hate by creating a critical
activity.
In many cases, an idealization of the disappeared is sustained and defended
vigorously, against a critical agency. This agency remains internal in the form of
self-reproach; in some cases, however, this is externalized as a reproach of the
regime. In both circumstances the ambivalence inherent in a love-object is split.
When external reality offers the opportunity to hold the hate, such as in the case
of a brutal regime, the cleavage is often externalized through projective
identification and a world without ambivalence is created.68 No shadow of a
doubt is allowed to enter consciousness, lest the ambivalence resurfaces, and
therefore a psychotic core is formed as a defence and this energizes the
anticathexis of the search.

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As time goes by, giving up the search is experienced as giving up the object,
as murdering it, yet to continue the search brings further evidence that the ego is
overwhelmed by the absent presence of the object, which demands active psychic
investment and yet returns nothing. The wish of allowing the reality principle to
operate as the starting point of mourning, with the accompanying acceptance of
the death of the loved one, must be repressed. A counter-investment, an
investment against, must be set up to keep the undesirable idea in the
unconscious; the undesirable idea, in this case, the wish to stop the searchis
repressed. To stop the search that will deliver at best a dead body and at worse
nothing, ever, is unthinkable. And this anti-cathexis has a psychic cost: it imposes
restrictions on the libido and restricts the mourners thoughts and activities. Not
wanting to experience the internal conflict, the mourner strives to delegate it as an
artificial exterior organ, which then becomes the source of all explanations. As a
result some survivors resolved the conflict by constructing a world of certainty.
In marked difference to the end of mourning, when the ego succeeds in
freeing its libido from the loss of the object; the libido is trapped in the absencepresence of the object, which is rooted both in fantasy and reality. The libido is
trapped in the day-to-day reality of the search and all its vicissitudes. The
tormenting absence is, however, rooted in fantasy, since an intense ideation about
the moment-by-moment circumstances of the disappearance is incessantly
elaborated and brooded over. These sadistic actions elaborated in fantasy were
often confirmed in the course of their intense search for the disappeared and
plagued their waking and dream life alike, in some cases creating a sado-masochist
incarceration of the libido, and thereby reproducing the imagined confinement of
the love object.
Non-politically oriented parents, for example, began to speak like the
politically active disappeared; brothers who held politically opposing views before
the disappearance, converted to a form of uncompromising communion with the
ideology of the disappeared and former friends became instant enemies. They

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often felt they had received the mandate to carry the directives of the disappeared
and dedicated from then on their lives to do so, sometimes changing professions,
geographic locations and hobbies in a manic effort to become like the one that was
not there anymore. It was a form of liberation from the internal presence of the
absent object, which was the cause of their suffering, and echoed Freuds
description of mania, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new object
cathexses previously invested in by the disappeared.69 The reconfiguration of the
psychic investment in the disappeared object, as well as in the other significant
others in the survivors life, took a very long time. And indeed, everybody in their
circle experienced, in one way or another, a cathexis-quake with many
successive aftershocks that changed their psychic landscape for ever.
Although day to day, the mourners memories are met with the reality that
the object no longer exists, the ego has to make the effort to overcome that
message of absence and create a substitute way to keep the other alive. This
occurs in order to defend the survivor from being persuaded by the sum of
narcissistic satisfaction he derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the
object that has been abolished. 70 Initially, his libido does not abandon the
unconscious presentation of the object, but a long-drawn-out search and the
conflict arising from ambivalence provokes in many survivors a similar situation to
the one described by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia: Countless separate
struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each
other: the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain
this position of the libido against the assault. 71 Evidence that the ego was
overwhelmed by the absence of the object and that the passing of time
exacerbated the conflict within the ego, became apparent in many of the
documented clinical cases.
If melancholia ends when the object has been abandoned, the survivor
faces endless melancholia because abandoning the search, as seen above, can
bring fantasies of murdering the disappeared once again.72 The following

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hypothesis can thus be put forward: the special mourning process, as identified by
Pelento and Braun, seems to borrow some of the features from melancholia, some
from mourning and is, at times, animated by a psychotic core. It resembles
mourning because there is a reaction to the real loss of a loved object, the
disappearance, but over and above this, it is marked by a determinant which is
absent in normal mourning. 73 It is special because it is melancholic in its retrieval
of cathexis through identification, yet it is a melancholia that does not abandon the
external love-object and often shows evidence of a psychotic core, for its passion
for certitude.74
It is not surprising that many relatives joined their suffering to create a
group response. For example, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo brought together
those women who were transformed from housewives to political activists by
externalizing their grief and refusing to mourn. They demanded an undoing of the
act, and Aparicin con Vida (Appearance alive) was their chant around the
Plaza. Asking for the bodies to appear alive was their demand: Con vida se los
llevaron, con vida los queremos (With life they took them away, with life we
want them back).
Others retreated into melancholia with a profound sense of failure as
parents, spouses, friends; they were plagued with self-reproaches such as why
didnt I take better care of her/him? As well, some of these families kept the
disappearance a well-guarded secret, refusing to be a part of the category
relatives of the disappeared; a category that as the years went by acquired, like
all categories, rigid edges of inclusion and exclusion.
Still other relatives raged against the disappeared themselves for inflicting
such an unwanted, undesired, unannounced narcissistic injury to those close to
them. With sentiments of anger and deep disappointment, they railed against the
navet of the disappeared. They considered that they were led by their youthful
impulses and romantic ideas about the future and had squandered what they had
been given by their parents. Sometimes spouses and grown up children joined this

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raging group, experiencing feelings of having being abandoned and given a second
place to politics in the life of the now disappeared family members. In many of
these cases, the politics of the parents/spouses were at variance with the politics
of the disappeared; this also contributed to certain people rejecting the notion
that the disappeared were innocent victims of a brutal regime.
Obstacles to engage in a mourning process were negotiated in different
ways through the long years of the military regime. In some cases this period was
longer than seven years because the disappearances had begun to occur before
1976, during the chaotic period of democracy that preceded the coup. The
responses to the disappeared acquired distinctive dynamics predicated on the
contingencies encountered by each survivor in their search, as well as the strength
of their psychological resources, i.e. the ability to translate the otherness of the
message. Trauma, says Laplanche, is too much other; in our case, it is the threat
of ego colonization and destruction by the absent-present haunting other.75 The
responses often changed over time, as those depressed became enraged, and the
enraged, in turn, depressed, and denial became a political tool more than hope of
undoing the act. Denial, melancholia, and rage were present in all cases in one
form or another, at one time or anotherand in this way, we can say that these
processes were truly special.

Jean Laplanche remarked that mourning is mentioned in Studies in Hysteria (1895d) to indicate two
elements which are directly linked to temporalisation: mourning is a kind of work, the work of memory

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(Erinnerungsarbeit in the case of Elisabeth); and it is an affect with a duration (Daueraffekt): it has a
beginning and an end, it occupies a lapse of time. Time and the Other, in Essays on Otherness, London:
Routledge, 1999, 241-242.
2
The extermination method confronted psychoanalysts [in Argentina] with mourning processes whose
features defied known descriptions of the working through of mourning. Consequently, in 1986 we
decided to call them special mourning processes. Braun, Julia, Shock and Awe Conference, Psychoanalytic
Institute of Northern California, 2009, 5-6.
3
The introduction of the conflict between life and death drives comes later in Freuds work (1920), the
crucial role played by self-destructive impulses in depressive patients was one of the factors that led
Freud to revise his first theory of the instinctual drives based on the pleasure/unpleasure principle as he
had formulated it in 1915. If the aim of every drive is above all to obtain satisfaction, how are we to
explain what may lead the depressive patient to commit suicide? It was in reply to this kind of question
that, in 1920, Freud put forward a new theory of the instinctual drives, based on the fundamental conflict
between life and death drives. Jean Michel Quinoz in On Freuds Mourning and Melancholia, edited by
Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz, London: Karnac, Chapter 9, 185.
4
An Interview with Jean Laplanche by Cathy Caruth, Emory University ccaruth@emory.edu, 2001 Cathy
Caruth.
5
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Psychoanalyst
uses this term not unlike the notion of Charles S. Peirce who defines the broad notion of an object as
anything that we can think or talk about. In a general sense it is any entity; in strict sense it refers to any
definite being.
6
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, London: the Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Volume XIII, (1913-1914),
31.
7
Freud, Totem and Taboo, 51.
8
Idem., 57.
9
Idem., 63.
10
Idem., 62.
11
Idem., 62.
12
Idem., 62-63.
13
Later in the century, Melanie Klein and W.R. Fairbairn would further theorize object relations theory.
Klein explored at length the relationship between mourning and primitive defence mechanisms, and
introduced her idea of two fundamental phases of development: the paranoid-schizoid position and the
depressive position. Melanie Klein also elaborated further Freuds concept of projection, proposing a
mechanism she called projective identification. It designates a psychological process similar to projection
but addressed a specificity of effect, in the sense that the behaviour towards the object of projection
invokes in that person precisely the thoughts, feelings or behaviours projected. Succinctly, what you
cannot stand in yourself, you locate and attack (or nurture) in the other. And the other may respond by
accepting and carrying the projection, i.e. fulfilling the prophesy or refusing the projection. See Polly
Young-Eisandrath. Women and Desire,London 2000, 227.
14
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, (1917e [1915]), 244.
15
Lagache, D. (1956) Pathological Mourning, in The works of Daniel Lagache: selected papers, 1938-1964,
Karnac Books, 1993, also Lagache, Daniel (1956). Le dueil pathologique, La Psychanalyse, 2:4.
16
Lipson, Channing T. (1963). Denial and Mourning. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 44: 104-107, 107.
17
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 253.
18
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 242.
19
Karl Abraham considered melancholia an archaic form of mourning. Abraham, Karl..A Short Study of
the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the light of Mental Disorders. Selected Papers. London: Hogarth,
1924, 435.

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20

Quinoz, Jean-Michel, Teaching Freuds Mourning and Melancholia, in On Freuds Mourning and
Melancholia, Leticia Glocer Fiorini,, Ed., London: Karnac,2009, Part II, Chapter 9, 181. The term
melancholia is now reserved for the most severe, psychotic form of depression.
21
Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.B, (1973), The Language of Psych-Analysis, Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. The International Psycho-Analytical Library, 94:1-497. London: The Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973, 230. Identification: Psychological process whereby the subject
assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after
the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is
constituted and specified. 205.
22
Sandor Ferenczi in 1909 in Introjection and Transference, wrote Whereas the paranoiac expels from
his ego the impulses that have become unpleasant, the neurotic helps himself by taking into the ego as
large as possible a part of the outside world, making it the object of unconscious phantasies{} One might
give to this process, in contrast to projection, the name of Introjection. Laplanche and Pontalis, 229, 230.
23
Fenichel, Otto, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, New York: Norton, 1945, 394.
24
Lipson, 107.
25
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 246.
26
Idem., 249. For Freud it is this change of direction from object cathexis to cathexis of part of the ego
identified with the object that explains the melancholics loss of interest.
27
Idem., 247.
28
Developed in 1921c, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S.E.18 and in 1923b, The Ego and
the Id, S.E.19.
29
Aslan, Carlos M. Mourning and Melancholia: A Freudian metapsychological updating, in On Freuds
Mourning and Melancholia, Leticia Glocer Fiorini,, Ed., London: Karnac, 2009, Part II, Chapter 8, 168.
30
Braun, Julia, Shock and Awe Conference, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, 2009, 5-6. Also
see Pelento, Maria Lucia. On Freuds Mourning and Melancholia, Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Ed., London:
Karnac. 2009, Part II, Chapter 2.
31
Pelento, Maria Lucia. Mourning for missing people, in On Freuds Mourning and Melancholia, Leticia
Glocer Fiorini,, Ed., London: Karnac, 2009, Part II, Chapter 2, 61.
32
Henckaerts, Jean-Marie and Doswald-Beck, International Committee of the Red Cross (2005).Customary
International Humanitarian Law: Rules, Cambridge University Press, 342.
33
Plan Condor Plan Condor (aka Operation Condor) was a campaign of political repression involving
intelligence and assassination operations implemented by the governments of the Southern Cone of
South America in the 1970s. The architects of this ambitious and successful plan to coordinate repression
were the military governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.
34
It is thought that in Argentina, between 1976 and 1983, up to 30,000 people (9,000 verified named
cases, according to the official report by the CONADEP) were subjected to forced disappearance. Report
of Conadep, Conclusions. nuncamas.org. 1984-09.
35
Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Stanford University Press, 2000,
9. Originally published in French in 1993 under the title Dieu, la mort et le temps, Editions Grasset and
Fasquelle.
36
Davis, Colin. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. New York:
Palgrave, 2007, 114.
37
Idem., 116.
38
Idem., 3. Quoting Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5. Davis later added, Freud provides the first psychoanalytic
template of the haunted subject, possessed by long-deceased ancestors and unable to bury its dead once
and for all, 23.
39
Laplanche, Jean. Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006. Editor and Textual Resier: John Fletcher,
Translators: John Fletcher, Jonathan House, Nicholas Rey, International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011,In
our view, the properly sexual character of the sexual life of the child remains impossible to define on a
purely physiological basis. It is inseparable form the appearance of the sexual fantasy, which is itself
correlative to the intervention of the other (the sexual adult) 258. See also, Jean Laplanche, The theory

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of seduction and the problem of the other Int J Psychoana. 1997 Aug, 78 ( Pt 4): 653-66. Also,
Seduction, Persecution and Revelation, in Essays on Otherness, Jean Laplanche, John Fletcher, Chapter 6,
London: Routledge, 1999.
40
Laplanche Jean. Freud and the Sexual, 175 and 205. Italics in the original.
41
Idem., 175 and 205.
42
Idem., 175.
43
Idem., 252, The infant polymorphous perversity does not pass away with childhood: whether
repressed or sublimated, it persists as a potentiality in every adult.
44
st
An Interview with Dominique Scarfone by Michael D. Levin, Psy.D. 1 . May, 2010. San Francisco Center
for Psychoanalysis, http://www.sf-cp.org
45
An Interview with Jean Laplanche by Cathy Caruth, Emory University ccaruth@emory.edu, 2001
Cathy Caruth.
46
Laplanche, Jean. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 103.
47
Laplanche, Jacques, Time and the Other in Essays on Otherness, 241 and footnote 17, 241. Also, see
Stein, Ruth. Moments in Laplanches Theory of Sexuality. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2007, 8 (2), l7980.
48
Idem., 255.
49
Idem., 255. He introduces this idea in page 241. Laplanche considers anti-psychoanalytic the
conception of the human individual as constructed around a primal kernel, which would be the
unconsciousa necessarily innate, biological instinctual kernel 241. By adopting this misguided
conception, psychoanalytic notions, he remarks, loose all their specificity, their extraneousness, their
alienesss. 241. To say he has an unconscious is according to Laplanche to say he has an originary
relation to the enigma of the other. This is how human activity gives rise to the process of time, as
temporalisation. 241 and footnote 17, 241.
50
Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual. Besides the dream, [however], the major situation capable of
reactivating (regen) the adults dormant infantile sexuality is actually that of caring for a child: in this
situation, reciprocity and asymmetry coexist. The reciprocity pertains to the adult/infans exchanges on
the level of self-preservation or attachment. The asymmetry derives from the fact that only the adult
harbours with him a repressed infantile sexual unconscious, and that this unconscious will try to infiltrate
the self-preservative communication, to the point of rendering it almost unintelligible. Such are what I call
the enigmatic messages addressed to the child. 292.
51
Idem., 32. Laplanches uses the word translation to indicate not only verbal, linguistic translation but
also inter-semiotic translation, from one type of language to another.
52
Laplanche uses this metaphor in two ways, one to describe developments in Freuds theories and the
other to speak of the formation of the unconscious and the emergence of the ego, i.e., From a
Copernican position, circulating around the message of the other to a Ptolemaic position, an illusion of a
universe that the ego feels it occupies the central position. La rvolution copernicienne inachevee:travaux
1967-1992, Paris, Aubier, 1992a.
53
Ruth Stein discussing the concept of trauma in Laplanche said, Trauma in a Laplanchian framework is
an uninterpretable intromission of untranslatable messages that deteriorate into sinister, garbled,
untranslatable missives of the super ego: it is characterized by messages that emerge from some
psychotic persecutory enclave, Moments in Laplanches Theory of Sexuality, Studies in Gender and
Sexuality, 2007, 8 (2): 177-220,188. Also see, Jean Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual, 301, for a distinction
between the two fates of [of the message] after it reaches the child. Either it remains enclaved
[enclav] inserted/enclosed in the amential state, which is to say untreated, unsymbolized,
untranslated by the small child; or is translated (a process which takes place after a waiting period),
included in the history of the subject.
54
Aslan, 169.
55
Love and hunger meet at the mothers breast, Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV-V, 189.
56
Family members travelling from Bs. As. to Patagonia for example, where they had been told to line up
to enter a jail at 7:00am in the morning in the hope to see their disappeared family member, only to find

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out , after lining up for several unrewarding days in the opened air in howling winter winds, since 3:00 am
to either not being able to come in to the jail or when finally allowed they would not find the relative or
any information about him/her.
57
Pelento, Maria Lucila. Mourning for missing people, in On Freuds Mourning and Melancholia 2009,
Part II, Chapter 2, 56-70, 62.
58
Idem., 63.
59
Idem., 64
60
Idem., 65.
61
Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido
is bound to the object is brought up (put on the boom/mast). And hypercathected, and the lsung (untie,
resolve, detachment) of the libido is accomplished in respect to it, 252-53.
62
See Laplanche, Time and the other, for an elaboration on Penelopes mourning, , her cloth and suitors.
63
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 257. Freud remarked that the loss of the love-object is an excellent
opportunity of the ambivalence in love relationship to make itself effective and come into the open,
and continues, the conflict will [then] be represented to consciousness as a conflict between one part of
the ego and the critical agency.
64
Identification as a form of incorporation, The egos wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in
accordance with the oral and cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so
by devouring it. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 249-250.
65
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 257.
66 Laplanche, J., Pontalis, J.B. The language of Psycho-Analysis, In the work of Melanie Klein, which is
closely related to Abraham's, the notion of ambivalence is central. For her, the instinct is ambivalent from
the start: love for the object is inseparable from its destruction, so that ambivalence becomes a quality
of the object itself. As such an ambivalent object, perfectly benevolent and fundamentally hostile at one
and the same time, would be intolerable, the subject struggles against his predicament by splitting it into
a good and a bad object. 27.
67
Oxford English Dictionary, also the hollow of a womans breasts when supported.
68
Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.B, The Language of Psych-Analysis, Projective identification may thus
be considered as a mode of projection*. If Klein speaks of identification here it is because it is the subject's
self that is projected. The Kleinian usage is consistent with the narrow sense to which psychoanalysis tends to confine the term projection: the ejection into the outside world of something which the
subject refuses in himselfthe projection of what is bad, 356.
69
Freud, S. Mourning and Melancholia, 255.
70
Idem., 255.
71
Idem., 256.
72
Freud, S. Mourning and Melancholia, 257-258.
73
Idem, 250.
74
In this aspect identification, Freud distinguished: The identification with the object also occurs in
hysteria, the difference however, between narcissistic and hysterical identification may be seen in this:
that whereas in the former the object-cathexis is abandoned, in the later it persists and manifests its
influence, 250.
75
An Interview with Jean Laplanche by Cathy Caruth, Emory University ccaruth@emory.edu, 2001
Cathy Caruth.

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Mourning the Dead, Mourning the Disappeared:

The Enigma of the Absent-Presence

Prague 2013

Copyright Cecilia Taiana 2012

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