On manic defenses, mourning, and the desperate attempt to remain omnipotent in the face of loss.
Sometimes the easiest way not to grieve is to convince yourself that what you've lost never mattered.
I didn't need them anyway.
They weren't that important.
I'm better off without them.
It sounds like strength.
But sometimes it's a defense against something much more painful.
In Kleinian psychoanalysis, adult loss can reactivate the anxieties of the depressive position: the fear that our loved and valued internal objects have been damaged or destroyed, accompanied by guilt over our own aggressive feelings towards them.
Grief forces us to confront something profoundly uncomfortable.
We loved something we could not completely control.
And now it is gone.
Manic defenses offer an escape from this helplessness.
They operate through three familiar mechanisms.
Control. The object is supposedly still under my power. If I can control it, I cannot truly lose it.
Triumph. I survived. The object didn't. I am stronger. My superiority protects me from the pain of dependence.
Contempt. It wasn't worth much anyway. Why mourn something so insignificant?
All three defend against the same unbearable recognition: the object was valuable, separate from me, and beyond my omnipotent control.
There's a peculiar suspension of reality in this defense.
What has been lost is not fully acknowledged as alive, because that would mean recognising its independent existence and importance.
But it is not fully acknowledged as dead either, because that would require accepting the loss.
The object remains psychologically neither alive nor dead.
Not because grief has been completed.
But because mourning has been prevented from beginning.
And this is the central paradox.
Contempt may look like freedom from attachment.
Triumph may look like recovery.
Control may look like strength.
Yet all three can keep us bound to the very object whose importance we deny.
To mourn is to relinquish omnipotence.
To acknowledge that something mattered.
That it existed beyond our control.
That we could love it, resent it, need it, and still be unable to keep it.
Sometimes the first step towards surviving a loss is giving up the illusion that we never had anything to lose.
Theoretical context: Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940), and the Kleinian elaboration of manic defenses through control, triumph, and contempt.
The depressive position is a psychoanalytic concept, not a synonym for clinical depression.