Unthinkable mournig and anguish from the perspective of the transmission of psychic life and refusal

Abstract

This study aims to present the causes of mourning, named as “unthinkable”, as a symptom associated with the anguish of separation. In this sense, this work approaches the theme of mourning as a constitutive trait of humanity, on the way of experience absence, considering the mechanism of refusal as a mode of psychic defense at the heart of the problem, which is transmitted psychically between generations, and which highlights a failure in the transmission from parents to children, being the factor that justifies the idea of subjects who carry in themselves overwhelming anguish of unelaborated losses, that is, prevented from an experience of mourning processing. In this sense, the work highlights unelaborated losses and traumas transmitted without symbolic value, without representation of meaning, rejected, preventing the subject from constructing a sense of their own existence. Unthinkable mourning is a way of organizing psychic life that is sustained through secrecy, the unspoken, above all the refused, causing anguish that implies threats of separation and loss.