SIGMUND FREUD TOLD MOURNERS TO GET OVER IT
Then his daughter died
The hypothesis that we must work through our grief has been repeated for over a century. Ironically, it was first suggested by a man who changed his views completely after losing a child.
In 1917, before experiencing personal loss, Sigmund Freud wrote his influential Mourning and Melancholia. In the paper, he defines mourning as a severing from an object (our loved one) that no longer exists. An inability to detach, he intoned, is pathological grief.
But loss changes us.
In 1920 Freud’s daughter Sophie died. She was twenty-six. The grieving father discovered the folly of his uninformed pronouncements. His later work displays a more compassionate understanding of the continuing bond that exists between parents and their dead children, most noticeably in his landmark book, The Ego and the Id (1923), written three years after Sophie’s death.
“My daughter who died would have been thirty-six years old today,” Freud wrote on Sophie’s birthday, April 12 1929. Many bereaved parents know their dead child’s age. My daughter was also twenty-six when she died in 2015. Today I can tell you Jess’s age without a moment’s hesitation.
Decades after Sigmund Freud’s adult daughter died, he wrote to a friend of the lasting impact of his loss: “Quite deep down I can trace the feelings of a deep narcissistic hurt that is not to be healed.” By this he meant a wound to his self-interested self. Perhaps Freud was right.
Part of healthy grieving includes a stark realization of the false perceptions we hold of our loved ones and ourselves. Any damage to the false self may lead to a clearing of the detritus of delusion. Ultimately, grief allows us to see our children as they were, not as we imagine them to be.
Freud then offered this advice to a friend who had recently lost his son:
“Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. . . . And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”
NOTES
Adapted from Songs on the Death of Children (Toplight/McFarland, 2022): 37–8, 66. Freud to Ludwig Binswanger, 12 April 1929, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, tr. Tania & James Stern (Basic Books, 1960, 1970): 386; Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id, tr. Joan Riviere (Hogarth, 1928); Clewell, Tammy, “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52(1) (March, 2004): 43–67; Finkbeiner, Ann, After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): 17; Frick, Eckhard, “Freud on Death: Does the Work of Mourning Entail the Breaking or Maintaining of Attachment?” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 65 (2009): 1219–33; Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, v3 (Basic Books, 1957): 20; Wright, Ronald and Brad Strawn, “Grief, Hope, and Prophetic Imagination: Psychoanalysis and Christian Tradition in Dialogue,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 29(2) (2010): 156; Zandvoort, Albert, “Living and Laughing in the Shadow of Death: Complicated Grief, Trauma and Resilience,” The British Journal of Psychotherapy Integration 9(2) (2012): 33–44. Photo by Princess Marie Bonaparte: Freud seated in his study in 1937.
