Revitalizing the Self Through Mourning: Reply to Commentaries

Abstract

In this reply, we primarily focus on Bassin's notion of the creative or regenerative aspect of mourning, while hoping to expand the role of embodied nostalgia in revitalizing the self. Additionally we address Spero's assertion that we claim to link sensory nostalgia and mourning in an “original” way. Lastly, we intend to clarify why his theoretical interpretations of Annie's arrested psychosexual development were not resonant with her presentation and clinical material.

Notes

¹Spero (this issue) suggests that mutative change may have occurred as Annie was able to return to a “prematurely, abandoned phase of her psychosexual development” and to “unscreen the dreaded shame of not knowing her own mother” (p. 727). This traditional approach to treatment differs from the contemporary relational framework from which we work and will be explicated in the final section of our rejoinder.

² Sohn (1983), similarly to Bassin, described “true” nostalgia as bringing the patient back to life. However, unlike Bassin's and our view of nostalgia, he regarded sensory nostalgia as a distraction to the analytic process. His view of “true nostalgia” suggests that return to life is an intellectualized process liberated from the hysteria of sensual affect.

³Actors, who use sense memories to perfect their craft of eliciting real emotion as opposed to simulating emotion, find that over time their sense memories have a diminution of emotional charge. New sense memories are then chosen to take their place (Lewis, 1958). The theory is that the actor, who desires to produce specific, real physical and emotional states, thinks back to a certain incident in his life, which moved him strongly at the time, and re-creates in his mind the physical circumstance of that moment, for example, where he was, what happened, the time of the day, the place, the surroundings (focusing primarily on the sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch of the place), and when this state of sensory recall is fully elaborated in memory, the emotion of the incident comes back into full form. The text of the play narrates the actor's emotional experience of his sense memory (Stanislavski, 1963), just as autobiographical memories narrate the patient's emotional experience of sense memory.

⁴ Bucci (2011) said the following about the analytic interaction: “The interaction is also unpredictable in that therapists today must negotiate this terrain largely without the explicit traditional guides of theory and technique. The analyst can no longer assume that there is a particular repressed scenario that is guiding the patient's experience, that he or she is avoiding, and that can be uncovered. The analyst can also not assume a set of rules and parameters that define the correct way to work. These changes bring freedom from theories and techniques that do not fit; they bring the uncertainty of freedom as well” (p. 50).