ABSTRACT
In many accounts of grief, the struggle to handle reality after losing a loved one is to be reconciled in a form of internalization of the deceased. As a way in which we attempt to keep our lost ones, we carry them with us in our narratives, in our vivid memories, in our rituals, and in our attempts to make sense beyond the lack of sense that is exposed to us by death. In his “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud (1917) describes how we enter a twilight zone of reality-testing when we mourn the loss of a loved one. No longer finding our lost other, our whole conception of reality is distorted and disrupted. Reality testing is a process of coming to term with no longer finding the other, and consists of what Freud called Trauerarbeit, grief work. Thus, Freud and with him many others describe mourning and the result of a process of mourning as an internalization of the relation with the deceased: “Mourning is one way we recreate our past by making it present—sometimes as memory, sometimes as psychic structure” (Lear 2017, 196). In the psychoanalytic tradition, Lear here quotes Loewald, internalization refers to “processes of transformation by which relationships and interactions between the individual psychic apparatus and its environment are changed into inner relationships and interaction within the psychic apparatus” (ibid.).
