Acknowledging Guilt as a First Step Toward Mourning: A Kleinian Response to “Is Healing Possible in Such Context?”

In this discussion of Ruganci et al (this issue), the author focuses a Kleinian lens on the individual’s resistance to mourning, and highlights the role played by unconscious phantasies and the defenses of splitting and projective identification in the traumatic process. The author details how in trauma, as in normal development, these defenses are called forth by the psyche to manage the inability to tolerate guilt and subsequent resistance to acknowledging destructiveness. This in turn interferes with the capacity to grieve internal object losses triggered by external traumatic events later in life. The author contrasts this understanding of trauma and mourning with the target paper’s depiction of the role of twinship in both.