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qualities. Following the loss, an immediate libidinal withdrawal from the internal object would take place, with de-neutralization of the death drive released in the form of destructiveness against self and others during the most persecutory stage of grief/mourning. This would lead to a rapid deterioration of said object, potentially harmful to the self, who is transiently identified with the dead in what he called thanatical identifications. A defensive process would then begin, the central mechanism of it being a huge counter-investment, a libidinal recharge of the internal object in order to neutralize the death drive. From the identification with the dead, one then transits to the fear of death, and to an excessive identification with the dead. The work of mourning continues with a passage from more thanatical to more erotic identifications, the diminution of the persecutory qualities based on the dead-alive object described by Willy Baranger, the passage from the concern for the mourning subject to the concern for the lost object, and a Self, enriched with positive identifications, would be part of this process. Aslan (1978) described it, paraphrasing Lagache, as “how to kill the dead without dying in the attempt”, and citing Garma´s (1978) idea of “giving life to the dead”. VI. Aj. Jorge Mario Mom: Objects in Phobia For Taszma de Maladesky (2003), a collaborator of Mom, interchangeability in terms of functions, relativity, and control of phobic and accompanying objects, is one of the highlights of Jorge Mom’s contributions. Here, anxiety is not only at the root of the symptom, it is the primary symptom. Mom (1961-1962) extends Freud’s second theory of anxiety, in which anxiety precedes repression, signalling displeasure to the ego. In Mom’s extended version, anxiety appears as a central function in the psychic economy of the subject: The subject, the ‘phobic object’ and the ‘accompanying object’ can alternate their functions according to a situational context. Mom talks about ‘phobic situation’ and ‘accompanying situation’, which account for the plasticity and mobility of the process. However, mobility also produces a confusing and dangerously undifferentiated situation for the phobic patient, who tries to avoid it by means of rigorous control. Thus, for Mom, phobia becomes the interplay of the entire phobic-accompanying situation: The subject who structures phobia intially seeks an object for establishing order. When the object is lost, loss of the boundary function occurs. This is followed by the ‘phobogenic object’ fullfilling a differentiating function, which leads to discrimination between the phobic object, accompanying object and subject. Frightening as it may be, this differentiation is sought as a solution to a terrifying catastrophic undifferentiation without limits, characterizing the phobic individual who feels he is going mad. The phobia prevents such a catastrophe: it helps to resolve the absence, it settles in place of what is absent, and it conceals the absence with its presence. The phobic object is necessary for the creation of the accompanying situation. The accompanying anxiety shields the phobic individual from even greater anxiety of ‘anxiety-as-a-signal-of-not-having-anxiety’.
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