title: The mourning process with brain injured patients.
abstract: The purpose of this article is to point out the specific aspects of the mourning process in cases of brain injury and to compare them to the mourning process in other kinds of pathology. The difficulty of this process in brain injured patients is related to the fact that the patient has to mourn over parts of his personality which have been lost, or have been changed and therefore are frequently difficult to be grasped by him. This unusual mourning process in its first stage is characterized by massive use of denial and isolation as defense mechanisms. In later stage, we are confronted with depressive reactions and witness introjective defense mechanisms which enable the patient to change his attitude toward himself and the surrounding world and to restore a kind of new life based on the residual parts of his previous personality.
mesh_terms: D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000523:psychology*; D004532:Ego; D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans