The Michigan Psychoanalytic Council

A discussion paper by Marilyn Charles, Ph.D. was added to the The Michigan Psychoanalytic Council site today. Here is a description of the file:

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The experience of loss is a powerful one that can affect us at many levels, from the most personal to our larger cultural underpinnings and world views. The inability to adequately mourn and integrate previous losses becomes an obstacle which interferes with attempts to work through later experiences of loss. This failure to mourn is passed along the generations via the types of constricted affective and cognitive functions that impede the establishment of good object relationships, thereby compounding the sense of aloneness and insufficiency in the face of a harsh and unforgiving world. When there is a cultural heritage of losses that have not been successfully mourned and integrated, cultural membership itself becomes a risk factor for pathological grief.

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