The Dark Interval: Inner Transformation Through Mourning and Memory

Abstract

For D.W. Winnicott, one way the ego defends against the death of the false self is through breakdown and emptiness. Melanie Klein says that in mourning, healing occurs through psychic restoration of the idealized love-object. Manic defenses prevent us from the fullness of reparative experience in breakdown and mourning. But Winnicott underestimates what the Christian faith offers in what he calls the ascensive-depressive experience. And Klein, relegating the mother to only the psyche, neglects the bodily significance of the Transfiguration and the Resurrection. Augustine's memoria and scriptural accounts of the empty tomb serve as a basis for exploring the difference between mourning and remembering in the unfolding of the interior life. Mary Magdalene witnesses to how a perspective that does not consider spirit as integrative to its developmental schema neglects transformation in its fullest definition.