Book Notice

The Dead Mother
by Gregorio Kohon

Vol 36 in The New Library of Psychoanalysis
Published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)
0-415-16528-8 1999 hbk
0-415-16529-6 1999 pbk

"This book brings together original essays in honour of André Green. Written by distinguished psychoanalysts, the collection develops the theme of his most famous paper of the same title, and describes the value of relating the concept of the dead mother to other areas of clinical interest: psychic reality, borderline phenomena, passions, and identifications.
The concept of the `dead mother' describes a clinical phenomenon, sometimes difficult to identify, but always present in a substantial number of patients. It describes a process by which the image of a living and loving mother is transformed into a distant figure: a toneless, practically inanimate, dead parent. In reality, the mother remains alive, but she has psychically 'died' for the child. This produces a depression in the child, who carries these feelings within him or her into adult life, as the experience of the loss of the mother's love is followed by the loss of meaning in life. Nothing makes sense any more for the child, but life seems to continue under the appearance of normality.
The Dead Mother provides a valuable contribution to literature on psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic approaches to grief, loss and depression".

 



'Readers will find this a valuable book - for the
lively dialogue between Green and Kohon, its
return to Green's major paper 'The dead mother',
for the individual authors' impressive responses
to it, and for the glimpse of the walls in the
present psychoanalytic scene, which Green has
both run up against and surmounted'.

Edna O’Shaughnessy
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
Review IJPA 82 (3) ,2001 

 

The books in this series can be ordered from Karnac Books Ltd



 

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