Violent Circumstances of Grief and Loss: A Psychoanalytical Approach

Abstract

The objective of this study is to reflect and analyze, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the difficulty in
adapting emotionally to the experience of loss (understood in its most fatidical dimension) of loved ones who
have been taken from us through violence, particularly with regard to the relationship between grief and
trauma, and the search for those persons who are missing. This study is being undertaken due to the need to
tackle one of the most pressing problem areas in Mexico, which requires consideration and study on the part of
psychology and other sciences. To accomplish this, diverse psychoanalytic theoretical and discursive methods
are used, with Freud as the main theoretical reference. The results reveal repeated reports of pain that evidence
the inability to assume the process of grieving, together with the associated trauma and the inadequacy of
words. From this position of subjective complication when faced with loss, the absence of an opportunity to
complete the grieving process when a personal loss occurs becomes evident, which implies that the subject
has to deal with the death of the other person as well as his own.