An Elegy for Motherless Daughters: Dissociation, Multiplicity, and Mourning

Abstract

Interweaving autobiographical narrative with clinical material, this essay examines the generative impact of an enactment initiated by an analyst who shares a history of early maternal loss with a group she led for motherless daughters. It invites readers to conceive of mourning from an intersubjective and multiple self-state perspective, where the boundaries of our inner object world meet the loss of an actual other, in a shared “third” space. Dissociative process will be examined as both a protector and inhibitor of mourning, both then and there and here and now, as it unfolds in the group process.