Depression in Relation to Early and Recent Parent Death

Abstract

Freud's Mourning and Melancholia (1917) stimulated much psychoanalytic speculation regarding the relationship between loss of a loved object and subsequent depression. Abraham (1924) considered ‘a severe injury to infantile narcissism brought about by successive disappointments in love’ to be an important factor in melancholia, and used the term ‘primal parathymia’ to describe the disagreeable experiences of childhood which give rise to adult depression. Klein (1940) related all states of depression and mourning in adults to a reawakening of the infant's struggle to make reparation to the mother he fears he has destroyed. She believed that adults who are prone to depression have never successfully worked through this earlier ‘depressive position’. Bowlby (i960) has likened adult grief and mourning to the reaction of children to separation from their mothers. He proposed the view (1961) that children are less capable of coping with death of a parent than adults and adopt the defensive mechanism of ego-splitting by which part of the ego still considers the parent to be alive. This imperfect resolution of the loss situation leads to a fixation on the lost parent and a tendency to react badly to further separations. Brown (1961), extending this theory, maintained that rejections in adult life are likely to release the repressed urges to recover the lost object, and to precipitate a depressive illness.

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