“We will see that in some cases that sadness, expressed by the boy in its personal behavior and its difficulties, is except hers own which the one of its surroundings and which the boy in certain form has been identified with her. Finally, the sadness of the boy - and this one is not the smaller problem than it considers it can not be apparent, remain hidden after a deceptive excitation and a false joviality that deceive, and has a defensive function against the depression.”
J-C. Arfouilloux
Sadness, weariness, duel, pain, misfortune, nostalgia, melancholy… all to these take us slight knowledge to the nucleus of the problem: the depression. And they can occur as much in adults as in children, although it turns out to be more difficult some to accept that a boy suffers a depression. And nevertheless, in agreement with Melanie Klein and Winnicott the depressive experience form leaves from the normal development of any individual. The current is that it is difficult to recognize in a boy sad a depressed boy even though complaint to be tired, or is shaken, to duer to me bad or refuses to eat or to even grow. Affection overflow the depressive it and the boy tends to flee from them through a descarriada conduct, the somatización or through maníaca defense. But these mechanisms of defense yes that can be shared by many adults who refuse to themselves the option to live a depression. He is current to listen to say them: “I do not have time to get depressed to me.”
In the maníaca defense, Winnicott explains, refuses all the serious one. “The death takes step to an exaggerated animation; silence, to the noise.”
But to live implies to happen necessarily through a succession of duels. The weaning, the growth, the passage of a stage to the other, etc., involve a series of the losses - attitudes, modalities and bonds that hit I I eat duel processes that not always are sufficiently well made. A quarter of the total of patients who go to the health centers presents/displays problems that could be considered related to some type of loss: a person who has died or of that she has herself separated, but also another type of objects with which we created bonds, like the house, a company animal, a work; the scholastic failures; the abandonment situations: divorce, separation, rejection of the parents; the familiar problems, the economic changes of address, problems, the deprivation of rank and privileges, the diagnosis of a serious or invalidante disease. All these estresantes factors can give rise to becoming unaccustomed reactions of depressive nature (sadness, weeping, hopelessness, impotence, rage and blame), besides important dysfunctions at social and labor level. We can understand the duel and the processes of duel like the set of mental representations and tie conducts with any affective loss. In any case, the duel is not a state, is a process that the subject lives actively, reason by which Freud denominated “work of duel”.
Typical of the duel they are the sadness, the reiterative memory of the passed away person, weeping, irritability, insomnia and difficulty to concentrate themselves and to carry out the daily workings. Its duration is variable although normally it is not superior to six months. Nevertheless a normal duel can end up bringing about a complete depressive upheaval that requires treatment.
“The duel supposes the process of progressive retirement of the libido inverted in the lost object and the preparation to reinvert it in one new one. As Freud in Duel and melancholy express the work of the duel follows the following steps. In the first place `the examination of the reality has shown that the loved object does not exist or and demand that the libido leaves all relations with the same… against that demand arises the most natural resistance because we know that the man does not leave tasteful any of those of his libido, even though he has found or a substitution. '”
It can be a normal or pathological duel. A pathological duel is based in factors prearrangers and the maintenance of a relation of ambivalence with the lost object. For Klein, the people who suffer pathological duels never have managed to surpass the depressive position that constitutes a stage of the normal infantile development, or to settle down a good objetal relation that she allows them to feel safe within his internal world.
For Enrish Lindemann “the acute duel constitutes a syndrome that is characterized by: a) somatic malaise (respiratory symptoms, digestive weakness and symptoms); b) preoccupation by the image of the deceased; c) it blames; d) hostile reactions; and e) dismantling of the conduct (like patognomónicos symptoms) that can accompany by the e) appearance of characteristics or characteristics of the dead in the behavior of the doliente.”
For Bowlby the duel is like an extension of a general answer of separation. A “instinct of underlying entailment” would exist. For Bowlby the normal duel usually lasts more than the pathological duel and many considered conducts pathological are in fact normal. The pathological duel supposes for Bowlby that the individual must have undergone dysfunctional parental relations in its early stages.
Bowlby identifies 4 phases:
Phase 1. Phase of numbness or shock
Phase 2. Phase of yearning and search
Phase 3. Phase of disorganization and hopelessness
Phase 4. Phase of reorganization
Parkes, on the other hand, from the theory of the bond identified three main forms of pathological duel: chronic duel, that supposes an indefinite prolongation of the duel with exaggeration of the symptoms, inhibited duel in which the majority of the symptoms of the normal duel is absent, and deferred duel, in which the emotions which they did not make his appearance after the loss trigger by another later event.
From the point of view of the social constructivism the duel is an emotional process. It depends on how the people construct the events and this construction depends on beliefs and proper values of its culture. It is understood that a “program of independent innate conduct” of these cultural values does not exist. The own touching state reinforces the own cultural beliefs and these, as well, model the form in which it express the emotion.
On the other hand Worden describes the process according to tasks:
Task 1: to accept the loss of the person or object
Task 2: to undergo the tie emotions to the loss
Task 3: to become qualified to develop in the world without the lost object
Task 4: relocating of the lost thing so that it does not prevent the affective investimiento of other objects.