title: Mourning in the psychoanalytic situation and in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
abstract: Recognizing that mourning builds psychic structure, the author highlights the ubiquitous and essential nature of mourning in the psychoanalytic situation. Reality testing is intimately connected to mourning and is the warp on which psychic structure is woven in the analytic situation. Reality testing necessarily involves opportunities for mourning and thus will be present in every analytic hour. The confrontation with reality is the basis for all processes of mourning, or for creating defenses against this painful experience. The author views mourning as fundamentally a transformational process, and Shakespeare's The Tempest is used to illustrate this aspect of mourning.
authors.affiliation: Member of the faculty at Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, Connecticut.
authors.forename: Sybil
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Houlding
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001601:Bereavement; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D011936:Reality Testing
keywords: Freud; Mourning; Shakespeare; The Tempest; ego formation; forgiveness; fort-da; loss; melancholia; reality testing; reconciliation; revenge; separation