Mourning and the symbolic process

Abstract

This paper describes the analysis of a patient whose difficulty symbolizing absence had prevented her from being able to mourn the loss of her father in her adolescence. Through a series of symbolic enactments and synchronistic events, she was eventually able to carry out a mourning ritual that enabled her to lay her father to rest. Some implications for symbolization are discussed, developing Segal's view of symbol formation as reparation: symbols are embedded in a context of communication and can only develop in the context of a relationship; they represent relationships as well as objects; and they are emergent in the sense that they exist within a complex web of interactive, multiple meaning and cannot be reduced back to any one object that they represent.