Healing – Alan Bore

As we witness the pandemic shift and move throughout the world, I wonder what the effects it will have on our own internal worlds. How do we make sense of the fact that we cannot see our loved ones? We see family and friends via a video link or a phone, but we cannot touch them. We have to stay away for all our survival.

We live with loss which is a constant. Isn’t loss part of the human condition anyway? From the day we are born we separate from mother. Growing and developing is about maturation, growing to be individual. However, more than ever we need each other during these times in a hope we will ‘touch’ and ‘see’ each other again.

We mourn the loss of people we have admired and celebrate their lives and achievements. Maybe there is something about loss, mourning and hope. Only time will tell.

As I look back at the early consultations there was a hungry and aggressive edge to them. My thinking at this time was that J’s inner world was finally ‘being seen’ and felt in a way previously unknown to her. There was an intense hunger to J that often seemed overwhelming and suffocating, causing me to retreat into states of literal comatose and unconsciousness, redolent of her mother whom J reported as ‘emotionally dead, untouchable and unreachable’. In referring to such deadness in The Dead Mother Complex, Andre Green skilfully describes this paralysing dynamic: “an image which has been constituted in the child’s mind following maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impregnating the cathexes of certain patients…and weighing on the destiny of their object-libidinal and narcissistic future..[The] dead mother … is a mother which remains alive but who is, so to speak, psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care” (Green A, 1986 P142)

Category: Healing

Loss

The Dead Mother