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Failure to Mourn, and Melancholia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Jonathan R. Pedder
Jonathan R. Pedder*
Affiliation:
Maudsley Hospital, London, SE5
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Summary

This paper reviews ideas about depression and mourning from various quarters, particularly from psychoanalytic writings, from the work of George Brown on the social origins of depression and from some of the work in behavioural psychotherapy on guided mourning. Its essence is foreshadowed in a statement of Winnicott's: “If in an individual the depressive position has been achieved and fully established, then the reaction to loss is grief, or sadness. Where there is some degree of failure at the depressive position the result of loss is depression”.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 141 , Issue 4 , October 1982 , pp. 329 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1982 

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