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in the idealized object a part of her or his own potential and reparation capacity to preserve them from masochism and danger of death. The ego/the self, feeling impoverished and fragile, searches for safety in a strong and intensely alive object. This is often observed in transferential manifestations: the analyst becomes the representative of this idealized object, and the self/the ego of the analysand participates in a symbiotic way in the vitality of the analyst. This symbiosis, not previously sufficiently valued, led Baranger to the conclusion that one of the bases of pathological grief/mourning is a previous symbiotic situation of the self/the ego with the lost object. It needs to be differentiated from its paranoid-schizoid counterpart that essentially functions on the basis of projective identification, this being assigned to control paranoid anxiety and eliminate all ambivalence. On the contrary, the depressive symbiosis works with introjective as well as projective identification, and the parts of the self/the ego and the object, projected or introjected, have undergone the special process of depressive cleavage/splitting. In other words, the idealized object contains fragile or dying aspects of the self/the ego together with its own vital potential. This is observed in transference, where the depressive patient’s fear of losing the analyst or fear of his or her destruction can be intense, and the process of bringing the analysis to its conclusion raises acute problems that cause relapses. VI. Ai. Carlos Mario Aslan: The Shadow of the Object Based on the idea that Freud had not reformulated Mourning and Melancholia after describing the structural theory and the death drive, Aslan (1978) related this to the avoidance of grief/mourning in psychoanalytic literature and culture, where all rituals were being abandoned in an attempt to deny one’s death and that of loved ones. His developments aimed at sustaining the meaning of grief/mourning as duel or combat, as a persecutory process which is generally dismissed in favor of grief/mourning as dolus or pain. He thought that the clear difference between introjection and identification, between primary and secondary identification, between temporary and structuring identifications and the central role of the theory of internal objects, made for a better understanding of grief/mourning. He also stated that Freud’s “pathognomonic introjection” of the object after its loss could no longer be sustained, arguing instead that this has a strong presence, a psychic existence within the self/the ego, prior to its loss. For this reason he preferred to talk about internal object rather than representation. He supposed that “internal object”, unlike “representation”, better reflects the alive, dynamic, relational character with the self. He thought that representation, as we use it, is more photographic, more static than internal object, unlike Vorstellung, which denotes also a theatrical presentation. Along this line of thinking, Asian argued that what is internalized and can be lost is an object relation, as determined by the Self, understood as a precipitate of drive investments,in object relations. Later, Asian (2003) describes a synchrony and a diachrony of the grieving/mourning process that would be played out in the psychic representation of the lost object which he called internal object, a complex ego/superego structure of preconscious and unconscious ideal
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