Melodie des Abschieds. Eine psychoanalytische Studie zur Trennungsangst

We can use separation as starting point in considering our whole psychic life, since it calls for its opposite pole, relating and love with its innumerable pre-runners and forms, all connected in diverse ways with sexuality, tenderness, devotion, desire, passion, friendship, narcissism etc., leading again - like love - to the painful counterpoint of separation, loss, death, madness etc. Separation also belongs to development, conducting back to the origins of our life and pointing to our ideas about the end of our life: Parting is a universal and repeated event in human life. Often it is painful and causes separation anxiety, but it is also one of the earliest incentives towards psychic development. Separation anxieties pervade our lives from birth to death, in various nuances and intensities. Psychoanalysis is a method for exploring and studying psychic processes to which there is hardly another access; it is a psychotherapeutic technique for treating psychic disturbances and illnesses; it is a science with a complex theory of psychic functions, and it allows also a critical understanding of cultural and sociological phenomena. Psychoanalysis can contribute a lot to the topic of relating and separating, to separation anxiety and separation pain, and to our responses to these experiences. In psychoanalysis we have the chance to allow past experience to become present, it develops spontaneously in the transference of the patient and meets an echo in the counter- transference of the psychoanalyst. Sigmund Freud describes in "Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety", how each of us experiences loss on a daily basis, an experience which prepares us for that of separation and loss in general. In children the experience of loss can be reduced to a single condition - namely, that of missing someone who is loved and longed for. Psychoanalysis draws a fundamental distinction between anxiety, pain, mourning and depression as a consequence of separation. During the therapeutic process in a psychoanalytic treatment weekends and holidays are usually occasions provoking the reappearance of earlier separation anxieties. The book is dedicated to everyone who is confronted with separations: for interested nonprofessionals, for candidates of psychoanalytic training, for students of psychology, of medical, social and pedagogical sciences. The book might be also interesting for colleagues - for psychoanalysts and psychodynamically oriented therapists focusing on theory as well as for those concentrating on practice because of two reasons: " The book tries to consider the problem of separation anxiety not only from a symbiotic aspect of the mother- child-relationship, but also based on the concept of triangulation. Most forms of separation- anxiety are dealing not only with the difficult solution of the mother-child-symbiosis, but also with the role of the third, who is efficient from the very beginnings. He is present in the desire of the mother and the realisation of the child and he becomes at one and the same time the cause of disturbing distractions of the mother`s attention. This oedipal situation is the base of the triangulation and the attached conflicts that play an important role in separations. " Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of today are more often than before addressed by patients who suffer from psychic illnesses summarized as `Borderline states`. They often are characterized by extensive separation anxiety; therefore, an enlarged understanding of this psychic phenomenon might be helpful. Main topics of this study are our split knowledge of transience, acknowledging and denying our death at the same time; the hidden "duel of age" in society; aggression and terror as reactions to separation anxiety; feelings of emptiness and psychosomatic impasses. Also the experience and the creation of art can foster the capacity of mourning, as we can see for instance in the myth of Pygmalion, in Arthur Schnitzler`s novel "Dying", in the literature about Venice, a city in danger, flooded with the melody of separation, or Alberto Giacometti`s disappearing figures.