Not Letting Go: From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies

Volkan, V.D. Not Letting Go: From Individual Perennial Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies. On Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, Leticia Glocer and Fioroni, (Eds.), pp. 90-109. London: International Psychoanalytic Association.

In this chapter I draw upon our findings, first by updating and summarizing the psychodynamics involved in an adult’s mourning and depression, about which Freud’s (1917e [1915]) conclusions still provide the basics. Second, I describe a condition that was not touched upon in “Mourning and Melancholia”: some individuals become stuck for years...or even for a lifetime...unable to let the lost person or thing go. They become “perennial mourners” while not developing depression. Third, I focus on societal mourning and ask this question: can a large group, such as an ethnic or religious group, become a society that suffers from perennial mourning?

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