Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2010, 55, 275–297

Mourning and the symbolic process

Warren Colman, St. Albans, UK

Abstract: This paper describes the analysis of a patient whose difficulty symbolizing
absence had prevented her from being able to mourn the loss of her father in her
adolescence. Through a series of symbolic enactments and synchronistic events, she was
eventually able to carry out a mourning ritual that enabled her to lay her father to rest.
Some implications for symbolization are discussed, developing Segal’s view of symbol
formation as reparation: symbols are embedded in a context of communication and
can only develop in the context of a relationship; they represent relationships as well
as objects; and they are emergent in the sense that they exist within a complex web of
interactive, multiple meaning and cannot be reduced back to any one object that they
represent.

Key words: absence, bulimia, intergenerational trauma, reparation, symbolization,

synchronicity, transcendent function

Introduction
This paper arose from an unusual request. After nearly six years of analysis,
a patient, whom I shall call Anna, was able to acknowledge the anniversary
of her father’s death when she was 15 by visiting the car-park where he had
collapsed and died of a heart-attack and laying flowers for him. At the time,
there had been a complete absence of mourning and it had taken many years
for her to be able to recover sufficient capacity to mourn to be able to carry out
such a symbolic act of remembrance. Three days later, a synchronistic event
occurred that brought to fruition a symbolic theme concerned with her father
that had reverberated through most of her analysis1 . Anna felt that these events
needed to be written about but that it would be difficult for her to do so in
a way that made it comprehensible to anyone who did not understand things
like synchronicity and the process of analysis. As we were discussing this in her
session, it became apparent that she was asking if I would write about it for her.
I realized that I was being given a symbolic task—that Anna was asking me to
honour her father’s memory as she had begun to do by leaving flowers for him.
Of course, such a request has many other meanings in the context of the analytic

1 This event is described later in the paper.

0021-8774/2010/5502/275 
C 2010, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
276 Warren Colman

relationship which I shall not discuss here but which remain part of the ongoing
work of this patient’s analysis. Suffice to say that I believe symbolic enactments
of this kind, when consciously undertaken albeit not consciously understood,
can have inestimable value for the analytic process, opening up possibilities that
may be stifled by a more strict adherence to analytic abstinence.
Anna’s wish was that the paper should serve as a memorial for a father
who, as I shall describe, had never been entirely able to exist. He had been,
as Anna herself had felt for many years, what she called ‘a shell person’. But,
she said, ‘when I’m dead and you’re dead, there will be your paper or at least
the after-effects of it having been created so my father won’t have to be a
shell person but will exist in the world as a person with a history’. Privately,
I associated this with Shakespeare’s depiction of the poet as one ‘who gives
to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’2 . In short, where nothing was,
there shall symbolic remembrance be. Later I suggested to Anna that mourning
is the process of symbolizing the loss. Or, as Anna said of her own developing
capacity to represent absence, it is making meaning out of nothing.

Symbolizing absence
I have previously written about the background of absence in all symbolic
representation since this requires the absence from the symbol of that which it
symbolizes—that is, the separation of the signifier from the signified. This means
that difficulties in being able to bear the emotional pain of absence may interfere
with the symbolic function and more generally, the experience of imagination
as psychically real (Colman 2006). In this paper, I want to consider the rather
more profound difficulty of symbolizing absence itself which is perhaps the
most fundamental aspect of ‘thinking’ in the special sense intended by Bion as
the process of representing emotional states by means of ‘alpha function’. Segal
expresses this clearly:
It is only when the infant can recognize the absence of the object that he can either
symbolize or think. Bion (1970) described it succinctly ‘no breast – therefore a
thought’. However, to be capable of having such an experience there must be a
part of the mind that can contain the anxiety of missing an object, a ‘no-breast’. The
container-contained relationship must have given rise to the creation of this part of the
mental apparatus, without which even the thought ‘no-breast’ could not be formed.
(Segal 1991, p. 57)

This suggests that the capacity for symbolic thought is deeply embedded in
an intersubjective matrix of communication. It is only through the process of

2 And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Sc1, 15–18)
Mourning and the symbolic process 277

maternal containment that the infant can develop the means of representing
to itself that which is absent, notably the mother herself. Ironically, then, the
more emotionally absent the mother is, and the more urgent the infant’s need
to form some mental representation for its experience of absence, the more
impoverished are its means of doing so. As a result, emotional experiences
associated with absence arouse that terror and panic that Bion referred to as
‘nameless dread’. It is simultaneously a something that is nothing or a nothing
that is something. It neither is, nor is not. Furthermore, this radical absence of
a maternal presence of mind vitiates the infant’s experience of its own existence
so that there is, in a sense, no one there to experience the absence. Without the
felt experience of existing (which is at this stage equivalent to existing in the
mind of the other), there is no possibility of representing that which is missing
since there is no subject to whom it could be represented. This un-thinkable
state of mind has been addressed in a recent paper by Gurevich who describes
it as an absent absence, ‘an insufferable pain which is not felt as such but exists
in various ways’:

Here external absence is also and at the same time internal absence because it is an
absence of and from the self, a dissociation. The psychic trauma of absence then
transmutes into ‘something’, while the absence itself becomes marked as ‘nothing’, a
nothing which in fact operates as though it were ‘something’ with a profound and
deeply intrusive impact on the vulnerable self.
(Gurevich 2008, p. 563)

Drawing on the work of Bromberg, Gurevich emphasizes the intersubjective

aspect of this state:

Just as there is no such thing as a baby, there is no such thing as a dissociated infant or
patient. Bromberg succinctly captures his whole theory in the title of the last chapter
of Standing in the Spaces: ‘Help! I’m Going Out of Your Mind’.
(Bromberg 1998, pp. 309–28)

For patients who have experienced such absence, the analyst’s capacity to think
becomes vital to their survival. Anna would frequently say to me, ‘You just
keep thinking or I’m fucked’.3

Symbolization and mourning

The un-thinkable absence at the core of one’s own being deeply impinges
on the later development of a capacity to symbolize the absence of a loved

3 This expression marks a striking contrast to the patient discussed by Britton (1989) who said ‘stop
that fucking thinking’ where there was an attack on thinking. Although patients who are unable
to symbolize their experience may resort to dissociation, evacuation and attacks on linking, it is
important to recognize that these are ultimately defensive strategies to deal with a more fundamental
absence of thinking and terror at what might be thought.
278 Warren Colman

object—a prerequisite for mourning. Perhaps the central task of mourning is

to make sense of the conflict between the absence of the lost object and the
continuing presence of an emotional relationship to that which is lost. It is
here that Jung’s notion of a transcendent function which enables conflicting
opposites to be transcended via an emergent symbolic realization can be seen
to be a crucial element of the mourning process.
Remarkably though, despite the importance of symbols in the Jungian
tradition and the potential relevance of the transcendent function to the
mourning process, there seems to be very little work on mourning in the Jungian
literature. Even Gordon’s work on Dying and Creating (1978) makes little
reference to mourning since her main interest is in our attitude to death itself
and the prospect of our own death, rather than the loss brought about by
the death of others. More recently, though, both Hewison (2003) and Godsil
(2005) have addressed the importance of mourning for psychic development
and the destructive consequences of avoiding it. Hewison expresses the view
that ‘without a process of mourning, of keeping in touch with our emotional
struggles with loss and change, the individuation process stalls’ (p. 701) while
Godsil draws on the oscillation between coniunctio and mortificatio in the
alchemical process, linking it to the oscillation between p-s ↔ d in Bion’s
formulation:

Mourning is central to the processes they describe because at every stage we have to
relinquish the self we know and its relationships with others against a background of
catastrophic anxiety that we might not become ourselves again in a new form.
(op.cit., p. 474)

Although both these writers show how development can be impeded by avoiding
the loss that is an inevitable aspect of change, their focus is not on the
mourning process itself and they do not draw the link between mourning and
symbolization4 . For this we may turn to the Kleinian tradition and, especially
to Hanna Segal’s development of Klein’s work on the depressive position. Klein
believed that mourning in adult life re-evokes the early guilt and anxiety of
having destroyed the lost object and thus the need to make reparation (Klein
1940). Segal took this idea forward by showing the essential role of symbols in
making reparation through restoring and recreating the lost object in symbolic
form. In her first published paper on ‘A psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics’
Segal suggested that sublimation could only be achieved through a process of
mourning and symbol formation:

4 The connection between mourning, symbolization and excessive experiences of absence is

discussed in a recent paper by MacKenna (2009) who also draws on the psychoanalytic tradition.
In accord with the view put forward here, MacKenna suggests that ‘our capacity to symbolize
develops as we become able to tolerate absence’ (p. 177).
Mourning and the symbolic process 279

Every aspect of the object, every situation that has to be given up in the process of
growing, gives rise to symbol formation. In this view symbol formation is the outcome
of a loss, it is a creative act involving the pain and the whole work of mourning.
(Segal 1952, pp. 201–2)

In this formulation, Segal offers a new understanding of symbol formation as a

creative activity that is centrally linked to the mourning process. The creation
of symbols is seen as providing a means by which the lost and destroyed object
may be repaired and restored in symbolic form. This means that difficulties
in symbolic representation are intimately linked to difficulties in mourning.
In particular, overwhelming anxieties about one’s own destructive impulses
will impede both mourning and symbolization but, pari passu, difficulties
in symbolization will impede mourning and increase feelings of being both
damaged and damaging. If mourning is the process of symbolizing the loss and
symbolization is dependent on adequate containment, failures of containment
will inevitably lead to serious difficulties in being able to mourn.
Before discussing this further, I want to describe the process of mourning
and symbolization that took place in Anna’s analysis. I shall then return to the
discussion of the relation between mourning and symbolization and will suggest
various ways in which Segal’s formulation may be elaborated and revised in the
light of this material.

Anna and the ugli fruit

Anna was drying her hair when the policeman came to the door to announce
that her father had died. Her mother was out so the policeman told his story to
her elder brother. Their father had been on his way home from work when he
collapsed and died in a nearby car park. Not knowing what else to do, Anna
resumed drying her hair. When her mother came home, she and her brother
went out to her aunt’s, leaving Anna to go off to the pub with her friend. No
one said anything about her father having just died except for a young lad she
met at the pub. He seemed concerned and ordered a taxi to take her home,
although she didn’t really understand why.
The next day Anna went off to school, ‘bright as a button’ to tell them that,
as her father had died, she wouldn’t be in for a few days. At home no one cried
and there was, as she said, ‘nothing’. At the church, the night before the funeral,
Anna heard her aunt crying a little and began to cry herself. Her mother sent
her home and told her it would be best if she did not come to the funeral. When
people came back to the house afterwards, Anna crept into the room and hid
behind one of the armchairs. Early in her analysis she told me that she felt she
had been there ever since. She had become what she called ‘a shell person’.
As the family home was tied to her father’s job as manager of a greengrocer’s
shop, Anna and her mother had to move, her brother having married three
weeks after father’s death (father was not mentioned at the wedding). It was
280 Warren Colman

at the flat, on the other side of town, that Anna felt that both she and her
mother went mad, although no one noticed that anything was wrong. Her
mother would make ‘strange noises’ of disapproval and seemed to find Anna’s
very existence irksome. When she was not making disparaging remarks, she
was drinking, bringing back a new boyfriend and ignoring her. Anna started
eating all the time and put on a great deal of weight. After a while, she started
making herself sick. After a couple of years, she knew she had to get away and
left home for her own survival. Her relationship with her mother continued to
deteriorate—and so did her bulimia.
Without much thought or sense of meaning, Anna was nevertheless able to
make a reasonably good life for herself. By the time of her analysis, she was in a
stable marriage with children she adored and with whom she had worked hard
to provide a better childhood than the one she had had. She was doing well in
a career she enjoyed and was only rarely bulimic. By this time, she had realized
that bulimia was a way of avoiding feeling.

Starting analysis
This was not, though, the primary reason for seeking analysis. Rather she
expressed a sense of curiosity and interest, a wanting to learn more about
herself. I was impressed by how insightful she was but wondered if there was
a ‘do it yourself’ aspect of this that warded off her need to depend on being
understood by me. She brought a dream about going to see a doctor who told
her that she had—or had previously had—cancer of the cervix. The doctor then
put a metal tube up her vagina to investigate further. She well understood the
negative transference implications of the dream which she related to a ‘disease’
in the area of her sexuality connected with her father and a fear that I, like
him, would be cold and mechanical like the metal tube. Perhaps by way of
compensation, I added an interpretation of the vagina as ‘the entrance to the
deep interior’ indicating Anna’s need and hope for a more positive kind of
penetration and a conception that might unfold in the analysis out of the womb
of the unconscious.
Anna seemed to me to present a clear case for the classical model of
individuation in which the ego needs to cede its imagined centrality to the larger
personality of the Self (Jung 1940/1954, paras. 390–91). She would often speak
of ‘her nice little world’ but knowing that beyond those confines lay a vast
and potentially terrifying world of the unknown that she nevertheless felt was
exciting and was irresistibly drawn towards exploring. I’m sure Jung would
have seen her as someone who had attended to the outer world demands of
the first half of life (family, work etc.) and for whom, in the second half of
life, the need for self-realization was coming into the ascendant. From a more
psychoanalytic perspective, it was clear too that her bulimia typified a way of
dealing with unconscious contents that could not be represented or symbolized
and which therefore were felt as a frightening, overwhelming invasion that could
Mourning and the symbolic process 281

only be dealt with by violent evacuation. From both perspectives, the need to
develop a greater capacity for symbolization (or, in Bion’s sense, ‘thinking’) was
apparent.

The first ugli fruit

About nine months into her analysis, Anna dreamed that she went into her
father’s greengrocer’s shop. There was an Asian shopkeeper from the Far East
whom she asked for an ugli fruit but he didn’t have one and so she left. (An
ugli fruit is a cross between a grapefruit, a Seville orange and a tangerine that
is found exclusively in Jamaica). She often dreamed of her father’s shop and
thinks he was happiest there although, even in the shop, there was a quality of
absence about her father, like a man who was not really there, only half-alive,
without personality. Much of the reason for this must go back to his war-time
experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war—referenced in the dream by the Asian
shopkeeper.
Anna’s father was captured when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February
1942. He was one of 50,000 troops sent to the Changi internment camp, a
military barracks that is now the site of Singapore International Airport. From
there he was sent to work on building the Burma-Thailand railway, known as
the Railway of Death, in an area that has become notorious for the extreme
hardship and cruelty imposed by the Japanese. As she later learnt, he was one of
the 7,000 British and Australian prisoners who between April and November
1943 endured appalling conditions, disease and death as forced slave labourers
in a remote area of Thailand jungle called Sonkurai. Almost half of the prisoners
did not survive and, of those that did, most were diseased and all were severely
weakened (MacArthur 2005). One of the only things she heard directly from
her father were his memories of having to burn the corpses of other prisoners—
and how sometimes the dead bodies would ‘sit up’ in the flames, as if not dead.
After several months, the surviving prisoners returned to Changi where Anna’s
father spent the rest of the war, returning home to spend 18 months in hospital
with what Anna now knows to have been beriberi.
The ugli fruit dream did not seem especially significant at the time but a week
later, Anna arrived at the session with an ugli fruit which she wanted to give
me. She had no idea why she had brought it and did not want to think about
it. I commented that it might be an image of her self which she accepted, saying
that she’d always liked ugli fruits, though they’re not very popular. They’re ugly
on the outside but juicy and exotic to eat.
For a while there was a complete absence of feeling in the session, even when
she referred to someone who was dying of cancer in the Far East, alone and
apparently unmourned by his family. Eventually, we returned to the ugli fruit
and she said she was afraid I wouldn’t accept it. Uncertain of its meaning,
particularly the potentially seductive implications of being offered her juicy
exotic fruit, I hesitated about whether I should keep it. However, the quality of
282 Warren Colman

unspeakable distress that followed made it clear that Oedipal sexuality was not
the issue here and that the fruit represented something far more fundamental
about ‘the self’ which made it absolutely vital that I accept her gift. She was
overwhelmed with a dreadful feeling that she shouldn’t have brought it and had
an image of herself as a little ugli fruit on legs running out of the door. Eventually
she was able to say that if she took it away with her, she would throw it in the bin
(cf. bulimia) but if I kept it, she would be involving me and this was unendurable.
This spoke directly to the feeling I had had in the initial consultation that she
wanted to do the analysis herself without involving me, as a way of avoiding all
the unbearable risks of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. And yet I knew
that it was only through an intense mutual emotional engagement between
us that the area in herself that was as yet unknown and unthinkable could
come into being through being emotionally contained and digested within my
mind. In one sense, bringing an actual piece of food for me to eat was a very
concrete representation of this process; yet in so far as the ugli fruit was an
embodiment of a dream-image that represented her self, it was at the same time
symbolic, in just the way that the Mass is symbolic even if it is asserted that the
bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus, since what is symbolic is the
transformation that takes place in the recipient through ingestion.
It was now apparent that the ugli fruit was a communication from a
dissociated part of herself that desperately did want to engage with me but
which she could barely begin to know about. At the same time, the connection
with her father’s shop and the association to the man who was dying alone in
the Far East showed that it was intimately connected with her father and, as it
turned out, represented the initiation of a lengthy and long-delayed mourning
process. It was an urgent but fearful request for me to become involved with
this terrible, unthinkable trauma of her dead father.
I knew too what I must do with Anna’s gift, though I could not say how I
knew. I took it home and ate it, making a point of sharing it with my family in
a way that felt to me like a ritual celebration (even though it was an ordinary
enough event for them). It was something precious and sharing it seemed to
me an acknowledgement of the nourishment and enjoyment that Anna could
bring, implicitly transforming her sense of herself as hateful and unwanted. A
few months later, Anna mentioned that she had given ugli fruits to her own
children when they were young, which made further sense of the need I felt to
share it with mine.
Although the ugli fruit was spoken about between us from time to time, it
belonged to the area in Anna that was not yet known or understood. Its potency
as a symbol was apparent and was felt by both of us but its meaning remained
unknown. Yet I also knew that there was something sacrosanct about the ugli
fruit and that I must not speak of it to anyone—and have not done so until now,
despite having a particular interest in symbolic objects brought to analysis.
Of course, I did not tell Anna what I had done and for a long time she
continued to worry about whether I might have thrown it in the bin. After all,
Mourning and the symbolic process 283

it was not like other gifts of wood and stone for example, that I might keep in a
drawer or on my desk. It had either to be eaten or, like a human body, it would
rot. So perhaps eating it might also have a meant something akin to a ‘burial’
ceremony in which the body is ingested by Mother Earth (Gordon 1978, p. 82).
Her worry also reflected her belief that she was rubbish, linked to her own
disgust at her fat body. This aspect of the transference was the very thing that
needed to be digested and perhaps detoxified through internal contact with my
sense of the preciousness of her ugli fruit self.
The link between eating and burial suggests a view of the ugli fruit as a
symbolic representation of her unconscious identity with her father—she asks
the man from the Far East to return her father to her so that he can be properly
buried and, through a process of digestion, she can separate out her own internal
goodness from the dead body of intergenerational trauma that has gone bad
inside her. Her father’s war experience was only the most obvious aspect of the
traumatic legacy passed down to her through the generations.

Family background
Anna’s parents both came from very deprived backgrounds—in Anna’s words
they had ‘shit lives’. Her father, who came from a poor Irish family, lost his
mother when he was 11 and there was a story, told with some scorn by Anna’s
mother, of him running after the funeral car in a distraught state, unable to let his
mother go. Her mother was illegitimate in a time and place when this was a huge
stigma and seems to have been regarded in this way by her own mother. Neither
parent had very much to draw on to develop loving, supportive relationships
and, in fact, Anna has increasingly realized that the family defended against the
vulnerability of needing love by dismissing it as ‘stupid’, a tendency to which
Anna still resorts in her relationship with me. Despite this, Anna feels that,
considering what they’d had to put up with, her parents had done pretty well,
having managed to construct at least the outer semblance of an ordinary decent,
hard-working family life.

The dead bird

Of course, Anna’s father was far from alone in not talking about his war
experiences and leaving his children forever wondering what he might have
been through and what effect it might have had on him. However, in her
family, this negating of painful experience extended much further and left her
with massive, un-thinkable anxiety about loss and death. There were several
antecedents to her father’s death, which in retrospect, provide indications of
why both she and her mother were so ill-equipped to deal with it. Family pets
did not die—they disappeared and became ‘gone’ with implausible but worrying
explanations that left Anna feeling that it must be her fault. On one occasion,
Anna rescued a baby bird and tried to keep it alive, having little real idea how
284 Warren Colman

to do so. Her parents took no interest and, when she came downstairs the
following morning, she found it dead. Her parents had gone out and neither of
them said anything about it. She hated them for that. There is something deeply
poignant here about a little girl desperately trying to save vulnerable creatures
from death and being overwhelmed by the impossibility of the task. If, with
Melanie Klein, we understand this need as connected with the need to make
reparation in order to overcome the depressive anxiety that hatred may destroy
loved objects, then we can see how the parents’ inability to support their little
girl in this task exacerbates the problem, since their abandonment of her serves
only to increase her hatred and thus her unprocessed terror of what her hatred
might do.

Symbolic redemption and the use of an object

In the analysis, this reparative task had to be carried forward on two fronts
simultaneously—firstly, in relation to the need to symbolically redeem her
father by giving him a proper symbolic burial and secondly, through the living
recreation of this difficulty in the transference relationship with me.
Both aspects are indicated in the symbolic act of giving me an aspect of
herself that represents her connection with her father. In this way the symbol
of the ugli fruit illustrates Jung’s dictum that the living symbol is the best
possible representation of an unknown fact. The symbol emerges out of the
unconscious aspect of the interaction between analyst and patient long before
its meaning can be known. And indeed the indeterminate and multiple aspect
of symbols means that the meaning itself is a living, growing thing in which
new meanings gradually emerge and accrue, never fully exhausting the symbolic
potential of the original symbolic gesture. The symbol of the ugli fruit may also
be regarded as a feature of the analytic third—it arises between analyst and
patient and expresses the relation between them. The symbol is not merely the
ugli fruit itself but also the action of giving it to me, my ritual use of it and our
subsequent discussions of it. It is embedded in and expresses an entire system
of relationship, much of which is unconscious (unknown). My acceptance of it
symbolizes my acceptance of the work of the analysis, all that Anna will need
me to do and be with her and for her in an as yet unknown future.5 This might
be regarded as interpretation through action, a creative form of enactment that
transforms the relational field in a way that verbal interpretations alone cannot
do, especially with regard to implicit relational configurations that are not yet
available for conscious reflection (‘thinking’). Here, the symbolic aspect goes
hand in hand with the implicit affective interplay between patient and analyst
(the intersubjective ‘third area’); the analyst’s emotional response provides the

5 In terms of Jung’s Psychology of the Transference (1946), it is the moment of the left-handed

contact, heralding the immersion of King and Queen in the alchemical bath.
Mourning and the symbolic process 285

medium out of which symbols grow and symbolization provides a means of

affecting emotional states as well as simply representing them.
One of the main ways in which these issues were to be worked out in the
transference was indicated by Anna’s recognition that what she wanted from
the analysis was for me to stay alive and not die. There is a strong echo here
of Winnicott’s formulation of the need for the object to survive destruction
in order to create an externality and reality that enables the object to be
used (Winnicott 1971). Without this, there can be no boundary or ‘edge’ to
the subject’s fantasies—fears of destruction remain omnipotent and infinite.
Furthermore, the subject cannot be established with what Winnicott called
‘unit status’. Without a boundary between self and other, there is no self and
a state of mind pertains in which the one cannot be distinguished from the
other.
This is the sort of anxiety that has dominated the difficult times in Anna’s
analysis. It is expressed not only in her injunction to me to ‘keep thinking or else
I’m fucked’ but in her persistent apprehension that she would become hateful
to me. As Winnicott writes

The word ‘destruction’ is needed, not because of the baby’s impulse to destroy, but
because of the object’s liability not to survive, which also means to suffer change in
quality, in attitude.
(Winnicott 1971, p. 92)

There have been several such occasions in the analysis, which always seem to
come out of the blue (i.e., the unconscious). Occasional mistakes and failings
on my part would leave her feeling betrayed and abandoned, overwhelmed by
a bewildering mix of her own hatred and a terror of becoming hateful to me.
As well as these outbreaks of un-thinkable rage, terror and despair, there have
also been the regular traumas of weekends and breaks to negotiate. It is out
of these times that Anna has been able to communicate to me what it is like
to have no mind to be in. Often she would arrive on a Monday morning in
dreadful distress yet unable to say anything about it other than to describe it as
a ‘something’ that is at the same time ‘nothing’.
I understood these states of mind to indicate a very early infantile failure of
containment, yet Anna maintained that it was only after her father’s death that
things went wrong for her in this way. Had this not happened, she would have
been OK. I think there is some truth in this, although I would say that it was the
infantile lack of containment that made the death of her father in adolescence
so traumatic since it revealed a deep fault-line in her capacity to mourn. To
put it another way, it revealed that she had been unable to work through the
depressive position with two interlinked consequences a) that she was unable to
create the kind of symbolic transformation of the dead that mourning requires
and b) that as a result, she was prone to a terrible dread of being fundamentally
hateful.
286 Warren Colman

Of course, the Kleinian view is that these two processes are one: the infant
recovers from its fear of having destroyed its objects by a process of reparation.
However, I want to suggest that the extreme anxiety about destructiveness
stems from the lack of containment of early absence which leaves the infant
with a ‘mindless’ area where things are in an unthinkable ‘gone’ state. It is
for this reason that death becomes incomprehensible and the restoration of the
lost object becomes impossible. In a healthy mourning process, this level of
guilt and anxiety is never reached and the process of grieving is accompanied
and ultimately resolved by a restorative process of symbolic transformation in
which the lost object ‘returns’ as a living symbolic presence.

The return of the undead

It is a different matter when the dead are not ‘lost’ but ‘gone’. Because absence
cannot be symbolized, the dead remain in a sort of limbo state, neither dead
nor alive. In Anna’s case, this was even worse since her father had hardly
seemed alive before he died. So it was doubly difficult to grasp the meaning of
his death. All this dramatically arose out of the unconscious in one of Anna’s
sessions in the fourth year of her analysis. By this time, she had done a lot of
work in making her father more real to her by researching historical accounts of
the Burma railway, making contact with other survivors and investigating what
records were available from the War Office about his capture and imprisonment.
Some of the records in his file were in Japanese; while she was looking at the
file, a Japanese man came and sat at the same table and she was able to ask
him to translate her father’s records for her. She was deeply affected by the
synchronistic implications of this event. It was at this time that she learnt that
he had been one of the prisoners sent to Sonkurai.
In the session I wish to describe, Anna was talking about her feeling that her
father had gone away somewhere, that it was her fault in some way and that she
was waiting for him to come back. I suggested that she experienced her father
as being in a timeless realm and it was as if there was a part of her that had
stepped out of time too since loss is about the passing of time—something that
was and is no more—and it was this she had been unable to register. She linked
this with a persistent feeling that her life was a dream and she didn’t know how
any of it had happened.
Musing further about this, I was reminded about the guilt I felt about
disposing of my parents’ things after they’d died, as if they might come back
one day and would need them. Then it had occurred to me that they no longer
needed anything. This had been a transformative moment in my own mourning
process since I realized that the parents who no longer needed anything were
not in the past tense but that I was thinking of them as present in some way.
They were dead alright but at the same time they were very much alive, yet in
this different ‘place’ where they didn’t need anything.
Mourning and the symbolic process 287

Eventually, out of this reverie I said ‘it’s hard to let the dead go because it feels
as if you’re abandoning them. Somewhere there is a part of you that always has
to be held in readiness for your father’s return’. There was a pause and then, as
if some awful thing was coming, something that she had known before whose
return she dreaded, she began to moan ‘Oh, god, oh god . . .’ and then let out a
piercing, blood curdling, terrified and terrifying scream—once, twice, perhaps
three times.
After she had calmed down, I asked her what it was that had ‘come through’
and she replied that it was ‘the smell of dead things’. I knew that this smell
was associated for her with the dead bird, amongst other things and thus, by
association, her dead father. It had preoccupied her for some time and she had
wondered whether it was possible for it to have been unconsciously transferred
to her from her father’s experience in the P.o.W. camps for it must certainly
have been a smell he knew well. This moment in the analysis was undoubtedly a
break-through and, as with the ugli fruit, we spent a good deal of time trying to
understand what it meant. As I see it now, it was the moment when her undead
father returned, like a horrifying nightmare of a putrefying living corpse. Yet
by the same token, it was the moment when she could begin the process of
memorializing him and symbolically burying him. At some level, she had been
unconsciously identified with this undead, half-alive father, so the eruption of
the nightmare in the session also signified her re-emergence from the frozen
state she had been in ever since the policeman knocked on the door while she
was blow-drying her hair. Something, however nightmarish, had returned to
life. Given how terrifying it was, it is not surprising that this was only possible
in the context of the containment provided by the analysis particularly, at
this point, by my implicit permission for her to experience her loss, conveyed
through speaking out of my own emotional experience of mourning. Without
directly knowing this, Anna could experience being with an analyst who was
‘acquainted with grief’6 in a way that had been impossible for her own parents.
She suddenly found that she could risk experiencing an emotional state that,
until this point, had been relegated to the land of the undead, a place of non-
being.
It also seems likely that this unconscious nightmare speaks to the dynamics of
her bulimia. It is not difficult to see how the phantasy of having a rotting corpse
inside her would lead her to want to vomit it up but, since this deadness was
also that sense of radical absence of being ‘gone’, it also makes sense of the other
pole of her bulimia—the desperate, urgent need to assuage an infinite hunger, a
gaping abyss of nothingness that could never be filled. Being overweight gave her
some security against the fear of becoming a ghost-like thing without substance
through reassuring her of her solidity, but her bingeing also left her with a

6 ‘He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah
53:3).
288 Warren Colman

guilt-fuelled horror of having done something dreadful and a sense of disgust

about her body from which she was always trying to escape.
It is important to realize that none of this had any form in Anna’s mind since
the symbolic function that would make it thinkable could not penetrate this
dissociated aspect of her self. (Perhaps this was the cancer in the ‘deep interior’
of her initial dream). These were not split-off unconscious phantasies that
were becoming conscious through the analysis of Anna’s defences; these were
unmetabolizable bits of terrifying nothing, unformed stifled affects that were
experienced bodily through action, requiring the application of the analyst’s
symbolic function to be realized as having meaning (Bovensiepen 2002). It
would thus be better to think of them as beta elements requiring the analyst’s
alpha function before they could be modified sufficiently to become thoughts. It
is, just as Anna says, a making meaning out of nothing. There is never anything
pre-given or one-dimensional about such meanings—like all symbolic meanings,
they are ‘over-determined’ which really means multiple and indeterminate,
subject to the protean energy of the imagination that gives to airy nothings
a local habitation and a name.

The synchronicity of the fallen tree

A few months after the emergence of her scream, Anna was able to formulate
this previously un-thinkable aspect of herself, paradoxically, in a dream-image
of a creature without form, a shapeless, blubbery walrus-like creature in a cold,
bleak sea holding up the shell person mask of her own face and pleading to be
fed. Another effect of this break-through was a decision to increase her sessions
to five times weekly, adding in a session on a Thursday.
It so happened that the anniversary of her father’s death was on a Thursday
that year, only two weeks after we had added in the Thursday session. That
day, the UK was hit by severe storms and gale force winds causing widespread
disruption to power supplies and the death of several people hit by falling trees
and walls. Anna arrived for her afternoon session saying that ‘something odd
has happened today’. When she drove home from work at lunchtime she found
that one of the trees in her garden had been blown over and was blocking the
road. Her neighbours came out to help her and one of them called the police
who came, were very helpful and arranged for the tree to be moved off the road.
As she recounted this story, the synchronistic significance of the fallen tree as a
symbol of her dead father grew in both our minds especially when she said ‘it’s
a big tree, well it was a big tree. We had two of them, now we have one’ (like
parents?). She also referred to the tree being ‘cremated’. It was as if the death of
her father was being replayed, with a quite different outcome. Where there had
been nothing and no one had noticed, now there was a world peopled with kind
and helpful others and a proper process of mourning and cremation could occur.
The anniversary of her father’s death had often been significant in an internal
way before—on one previous anniversary she had fallen into a deep depression,
Mourning and the symbolic process 289

on another she had dreamed of being shot in the head and woken up with
a terrible headache. This year, because of all the mourning work that had
been going on in the analysis, she had been anticipating the anniversary with a
much more focused conscious awareness than ever before. This demonstrated
conclusively to me that there was a real synchronicity here between the internally
significant event of the anniversary and the external event of the fallen tree.
Furthermore, it was only because she had recently increased her session that
she was able to come to her analysis on the anniversary itself. Through the
death of the tree, she was able to re-live and re-work her father’s death in a
new way that seemed to detoxify it by showing how different her life now was
to her life when he died. It felt like a sign, a gift from God; it produced that
strange conviction of all true synchronicities that we are not alone and that the
material world is active in our fate.
At first, Anna was frightened by the coincidence, feeling that she might have
made it happen like she made her father’s death happen. It felt ‘weird’ and
potentially overwhelming. I understood this fear to refer to the level of the
symmetrical unconscious where everything is interchangeable with everything
else, past and future are one and there is no distinction between intention
and action, so wishing her father dead would be the same as killing him
and being responsible for one thing would mean she was responsible for
everything (Matte-Blanco 1975; Carvalho 2006). This seems very similar to
the area of the psychoid unconscious from which Jung believed synchronicities
emanate since, in the psychoid unconscious, mind and matter are united in
the unus mundus. However, unlike the mindless states of the symmetrical
unconscious, synchronicities are quintessentially symbolic events: coincidences,
no matter how dramatic, only become synchronicities through being endowed
with symbolic meaning, whether that meaning is discovered, created or some
alchemical concatenation of both (Bright 1997).
Furthermore, a synchronistic symbol of this kind goes further than symbols
like the ugli fruit that emerge from the communicative interaction between
conscious and unconscious or patient and analyst via the transcendent function.
Here, as Murray Stein says, the symbolic image is an object in its own right,
beyond the action of the psyche:

It is in the hands of something else, and its timing is orchestrated by a power or

principle that is beyond human control or knowing. It is an object that mirrors the
subjective phenomenon and participates in the psychic picture meaningfully and in a
timely fashion, but it is not determined, created, or dependent upon the subject. . . . It
reaches out beyond the psyche, and through its synchronistically orchestrated presence
it implies the movement of a transcendent factor breaking into the time-space-causality
framework. It brings one to a belief in objective meaning . . .
(Stein 2008)

So the more that Anna could symbolize the fallen tree as being a synchronistic
event, the more her fears of magical control could be allayed. Not my will,
290 Warren Colman

but thy will be done. For this, though, she required my help; my conviction
helped strengthen her own capacity to accommodate this pneumatic gust from
the world of the ‘other’. I might say, using Bion’s formulation, that I was able
to contain and transform something out of the psychoid unconscious through
‘Faith in O’. This enabled her to think about the meaning of the event and
thus to symbolize it—a kind of thinking that could begin to accommodate the
previously unthinkable unconscious. In Jungian terms this requires an ego that
can accommodate a message from the Self and, in doing so, experience the deep
comfort of being accommodated by the Self. And it was clear too that this was
only possible because of the analysis—that it was the symbolic space of the
analysis that enabled the symbolic meaning of the fallen tree to be recognized
and accommodated. If I stopped thinking, she was fucked; but if I could keep
thinking, there could be a symbolic coniunctio.

The second ugli fruit

It was exactly a year later that a second synchronicity occurred, the one to
which I referred in the opening paragraph of this paper which seemed to bring
the symbolic mourning process to its conclusion. On that anniversary, Anna was
finally able to carry out a mourning ritual of laying flowers at the place where
her father died, an ordinary enough event in itself but a massive achievement
given her previous inability to symbolize absence.
Ever since she had brought me the ugli fruit she had looked out in the local
supermarket for another one. Often, when she found the analysis unbearably
hard going, she would say, ‘As soon as they’ve got ugli fruits in the shops again,
that’ll be the sign that I’m done and that’ll be the day I’ll leave’. Privately, I hoped
she wouldn’t find one since we were clearly nowhere near done. Fortunately,
ugli fruits seemed to remain unavailable—perhaps no-one wanted them any
more. Then, some months previously, she had had a kind of active imagination
in which she visited her father in the shop and he told her that he would give
her an ugli fruit. On the third day after laying flowers for him, Anna went to a
different supermarket and while looking for something else, found a shelf full
of ugli fruits.
She bought two—one for me and one for herself, perhaps indicating that a
separation had taken place both between her and her father and between her
and me. It was when she brought mine to the following session that we talked
of writing about it. And she also said this: that she had thought that she would
not be alright until her father was alright, but now she saw that he could not
be alright until she was. Now he could rest and be at peace7 .

7 I am grateful to Richard Carvalho for pointing out the connection between this aspect of Anna’s
analysis and Henri Rey’s suggestion that some patients unconsciously seek help not for themselves
but for ‘their important damaged inner objects without [whose] reparation the subject’s self cannot
function normally and happily’ (Rey 1988, p. 457).
Mourning and the symbolic process 291

For a while after this, it seemed as if the analysis were approaching its peaceful
conclusion. In fact, this was not the case. Although the issue with which this
paper is primarily concerned—the symbolization of absence—has undoubtedly
been transformed, at the time of writing further work remained to be done
around Anna’s conviction of being hateful and her difficulty in believing in my
concern for her. That, however, belongs to another story.

Discussion
There is a good deal in this clinical material that supports the Kleinian
formulation that symbolic representation emerges out of the mourning process
of the depressive position and involves making reparation for fantasized
destructive attacks on the lost object, thus working through guilt and enabling
the restoration of the lost object through its recreation in symbolic form.
Nevertheless, I think there is also much that goes beyond this formulation.

1) Symbolizing absence
Firstly, I have suggested that the most fundamental requirement of mourning is
the capacity to symbolize absence. Since the restoration of lost objects is pre-
eminently a symbolic process, this cannot be achieved if absence remains in the
unthinkable state of being ‘gone’ where the absence of the object is co-existent
with the absence of a mind in which it can be known. In Bion’s terms, there
are only beta elements without a thinker to process them. This can only occur
through the internalization of a container/contained apparatus which enables
the development of alpha function and the formulation of mental contents into
thoughts.
This has two implications for mourning and the symbolic process. Firstly it
suggests that difficulty in resolving the depressive position may be due more
to the difficulties in symbolic representation consequent upon an absence of
alpha function (internalized containment) than to any actual excess of hatred
and destructiveness.
Secondly, it highlights the fact that symbols can only emerge in the context of
a relationship of meaning-making. They are thus both functions and instruments
of communication.

2) Symbols as communication
This widens out our view of symbol formation to a form of communication
that exists between people rather than ‘inside’ them. That is, symbolic
communication with others precedes the capacity to use symbols as a means of
representing internal states of mind to oneself. Where there is a disavowal of the
significance of emotional states within the family, there will also be an absence of
emotionally significant images to represent them. As a result, these emotional
292 Warren Colman

states are experienced as bizarre, incomprehensible and/or frightening. This

came up in Anna’s material again and again as a state to which she can only refer
as ‘nothing’, especially in relation to death whether it was family pets, the dead
bird or her dead father. It was only later, in the context of the communication
with me that an event such as the dead bird that she tried to keep alive could
be rendered symbolic through being acknowledged as emotionally meaningful.
Jung’s depiction of the transcendent function concerns the dialogue between
conscious and unconscious in which the analyst is no more than a catalyst.
The view that I am proposing, arising out of previous discussions of the role
of the transcendent function in the analyst in enabling a symbolic process to
develop (Davidson 1966; Bovensiepen 2002), is one in which the transcendent
function operates between patient and analyst and it is out of this space that
symbols emerge as communicative gestures. In this view symbols are a feature
and function of what Ogden has called the analytic third—‘the jointly created
unconscious life of the analytic pair’ (Ogden 1994, 2004).

3) Symbols represent relationships

This leads to a view of symbols as representations not simply of objects but
of the relationship between objects—their multiple, fluid nature echoes the
ever-shifting dynamics of relationships and therefore enables relations between
things to be represented much more successfully than through the linear means
of verbal communication8 . This is apparent in the symbolism of the ugli fruit
which simultaneously represents a self-image, an aspect of the father, and the
relation between parents and children and analyst and patient (she finds them
in her father’s shop, she gives them to her children, I give them to mine).
There is a reference here to that which is passed down from generation to
generation. There are further meanings too such as the ‘ugly’ aspect that is juicy
and exotic inside and the poignancy of a half-alive father who is most alive
when surrounded by nourishing fruit and vegetables. And in the second vision,
borne out by the synchronicity of the ugli fruits in the supermarket, it is this
dead father that sends his daughter the fruit that restores them both to symbolic
life.

4) Symbols are emergent

Clearly then, a view of symbols that regards them as the diversion of instinctual
wishes onto substitute objects is inadequate to explain the rich complexity

8 Gordon (1978) suggests that this is what Jung meant by the symbol as a representation of an
‘unknown fact’ – not that the symbol was unknowable but that it expresses facts, relationships
and sensuous and emotional experiences that are too complex to be conveyed by mere intellectual
formulations (pp. 107–8).
Mourning and the symbolic process 293

of meaning that symbols of this kind are able to represent. The symbol can
never be reduced back to any ‘ultimate’ object which it ‘stands for’ but has
its essential being in the complex interactive web of meanings that sustains its
affective significance. This is what makes symbols emergent phenomena whose
properties cannot be reduced to their original components.
I think too that this emergent, relational aspect of the symbol enables it to
take on a living reality in the imaginal world and thus to redeem the dead
and restore faith in creative living. Thus the final point I want to make is that
symbolizing loss is not merely a re-creation but the emergence of something
new—not just re-creation but a creative act of bringing a new imaginal reality
into being9 . I think this is because the symbol crystallizes the network of
relationships out of which it emerges. So a symbolic representation of a lost
loved one is never merely a symbol of the person themselves, but of the entire
relationship with that person, transformed and kept alive in symbolic form.
And, as a living thing, it is never complete, always in motion and sustained by
the ultimate enigma of absence and death. Symbolic creativity is a work that
is never done; it is an ongoing act of faith in loving remembrance, an active
transcendence of the opposition between life and death, love and hate, hope and
despair.

Coda: my father’s knife

As a concluding coda, I would like to illustrate this with an example of a
symbol from my own experience of mourning. I have on my desk a penknife
that belonged to my father. It was on his desk when he died as he’d been using
it as a letter opener and I now use it for the same purpose. On the day he
died, I resolved that this was the object I wanted to have to remember him
by. This rusty old knife with a yellowing ivory handle had belonged to my
father’s father; it acts as a reminder not only of my own father but of his father
before him and that which is passed on through the generations. It is one of
only a very few objects that have been passed down from my grandparents
as they were immigrants from Eastern Europe who lived most of their lives in
poverty. Like all immigrants, they carried with them the hope for a better life
through their children and their children’s children. So this little penknife links
me to my Jewish heritage in the shtetls of Russia and Romania and in turn
links those ancestral aspirations to my own achievements in the world of today.
By a further series of associations the knife is linked to the sword, the phallus
and the idea that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. So it is also a symbolic
representation of male potency that for both my father and myself is linked to
work done sitting at a desk and which, for me, is particularly associated with

9 Similarly, Gordon, following Jung and the philosopher of art L.A. Reid, says that ‘the symbol
potentially mediates the discovery of some new dimensions of being’ (Gordon 1978, p. 109).
294 Warren Colman

writing. Nor is it any coincidence that, in my own mourning process, it was

my capacity to write that suffered most. As with the ugli fruit, almost none of
this was apparent to me on the day I picked it up from his desk: the symbol is
a living thing that changes and grows as new meanings are generated out of a
creative process of relationship.
Through this example, the astute listener may have already picked up one of
the reasons I was prompted to take up Anna’s hint that I might write about the
symbolism of the ugli fruit in her mourning process. Certainly it could be said
that my father’s knife is for me what the ugli fruit is for her10 . Such symbols
are precious indeed since they are a gift from the ancestors and thus represent a
further conjunction of opposites between time and eternity. The knife and the
fruit are objects in time—the ugli fruit especially symbolizes this in its fleshy,
perishable nature—but they are gifts from the world of those who live beyond
time, in eternity. They are physical material objects but they are simultaneously
representations of our own imperishable spiritual being. The synchronicity by
which Anna came upon the ugli fruits reinforces this sense of a world beyond
time, space and causality. Stein suggests that a synchronistic event of this kind
offers the ground for faith.

It is what religious people call revelation, a voluntary (i.e., graced) disclosure of the
Infinite and Ultimate to the human.
(Stein 2008)

In that sense, the ugli fruit did not merely symbolize a gift from her father—it
was a gift from her father. However, this was only possible as the outcome of
the ‘alchemical’ work of the transcendent function taking place in the analysis,
within and between both parties, transmuting the base matter of dead things
into the golden fruits of the living symbol. And it is this that is acknowledged
in the second ugli fruit that Anna gives to me, not like the first one, as a symbol
of her as yet unknown self, but as a conscious act of gratitude and love. This
paper is thus also my acknowledgement of her gift and an expression of my
gratitude to her. It is, as she wished, dedicated to her father but it must also
be dedicated to my father and to all our fathers (and mothers): a gift from the
living to the dead in honour and thankfulness.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article décrit l’analyse d’une patiente dont les difficultés à symboliser l’absence
l’avaient empêchée de faire le deuil de son père, mort alors qu’elle était adolescente. A
travers une série de mises en acte symboliques et de synchronicités événementielles, elle
parvint à effectuer un rituel de deuil à travers lequel elle réussit enfin à laisser son père

10 There is a further possible synchronicity here: although they were not the same age, both my
father and Anna’s father share the same birthday, which is also her son’s birthday.
Mourning and the symbolic process 295

reposer en paix. Il est question dans l’article des conditions de la symbolisation, l’auteur
développant les vues de Segal sur la formation de symbole en tant que réparation,
les symboles sont compris dans un contexte de communication et ne peuvent se
développer que dans un contexte relationnel; ils représentent les relations autant que
les objets; et ils sont émergents, au sens où ils existent au sein d’un tissu complexe de
significations multiples et interactives et ne peuvent être réduits à un quelconque objet
qu’ils représenteraient.

Der Aufsatz beschreibt die Analyse einer Patientin, deren Unfähigkeit Abwesenheit
zu symbolisieren verhinderte, daß sie den Verlust ihres Vaters in ihrer Adoleszenz
betrauern konnte. Durch eine Serie symbolischer Statuierungen und synchronistischer
Ereignisse kam sie in die Lage ein Trauerritual auszuführen worauf es ihr möglich
wurde, ihren Vater innerlich zu bestatten. Mit der Darstellung von Segals Auffassung
der symbolischen Gestaltung als Reparaturvorgang werden einige Implikationen der
Symbolisierung diskutiert: Symbole sind eingebettet in einen Kontext von Kommunika-
tion und können sich nur im Kontext einer Beziehung entwickeln. Sie repräsentieren
Beziehungen ebenso wie Objekte und sie sind emergent in dem Sinne, daß sie
in einem komplexen Netz interaktiver multipler Bedeutungen existieren und nicht
nach rückwärts auf irgendein einzelnes Objekt reduziert werden können, welches sie
vertreten.

In questo lavoro viene descritta l’analisi di una paziente le cui difficoltà nel simbolizzare
l’assenza non le hanno permesso di essere in grado di vivere il lutto della morte del padre
avvenuto durante la sua adolescenza. Attraverso una serie di rappresentazioni e di eventi
sincronici alla fine ella fu in grado di costruire un rituale funebre che la rese capace di
lasciare che il padre riposasse. Ampliando il punto di vista di Segal sulla formazione del
simbolo riparatore, vengono discusse alcune implicazioni che riguardano la capacità di
simbolizzare : i simboli sono inseriti in un contesto comunicativo e possono svilupparsi
solo nel contesto di una relazione: essi rappresentano sia le relazioni che gli oggetti ed
emergono nel senso che essi esistono all’interno di una trama complessa di significati
molteplici interattivi e non possono essere ricondotti a nessun oggetto singolo che essi
rappresentano.

tat stat opisyvaet analiz pacientki, kotoro trudno bylo

simvolizirovat otsutstvie, qto ne davalo e vozmonosti otgorevat
poter otca v nosti. Qerez seri simvoliqeskih razygryvani i
sinhronistiqeskih sobyti ona, faktiqeski, smogla provesti skorbny
ritual, pozvolivxi e otpustit otca na poko. Obsudats nekotorye
primeneni simvolizacii, razvivawie toqku zreni Sigal na formirovanie
simvola kak vozmeweni: simvoly vpletats v kontekst kommunikacii i
mogut razvivats tolko v kontekste otnoxeni, oni olicetvort kak
obekty, tak i otnoxeni, i oni provlts v tom smysle, qto oni
suwestvut vnutri slono seti mnoestva peresekawihs znaqeni i ne
svodimy obratno ni k odnomu iz odinoqnyh obektov, kotorye olicetvort.
296 Warren Colman

Este trabajo describe el análisis de una paciente cuya dificultad para simbolizar ausencias
la habı́a impedido llorar la pérdida de su padre en la adolescencia. Por una serie de
representaciones simbólicas y acontecimientos sincrónicos, ella pudo finalmente llevar
a cabo un ritual de duelo que le permitió dejar descansar a su padre. Se discuten
algunas implicaciones para la simbolización, desarrollando el punto de vista de Segal
para formación de sı́mbolos como reparación: los sı́mbolos están enmarcados en la
comunicación y sólo pueden desarrollarse en el contexto de la relación; ellos representan
a las relaciones ası́ como a los objetos; y son los emergentes, en el sentido que ellos
existen dentro de una red compleja de significados múltiples interactivos, y no pueden
ser reducidos regresivamente a cualquier objeto que ellos representen.

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