As we will see momentarily, Anderson experienced the mourning of abandonment feelings due to her first marital partner's abandoning her for another woman, but also the mourning of bereavement due to her second marital partner's death.
As a result of her own devastating experience of being abandoned by her marital partner of eighteen years for another woman, Anderson suffered shattering abandonment feelings. Of necessity, she entered into the journey of mourning her great loss. Her journey into her abandonment feelings can be likened to Dante-the-poet's imaginary journey into the underworld in the Divine Comedy. Being Italian, Dante-the-poet selected Virgil, the famous Roman poet, to be the guide of Dante-the-character in his journey through the Inferno and the Purgatorio, and Dante-the-poet constructed a composite female character based on a girl he had known named Beatrice to guide Dante-the-character through the Paradiso. Throughout his journey through the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, Dante-the-character is usually not in the best of shape, to put it mildly. Perhaps we could understand him to be suffering abandonment feelings, in which case we could liken his journey through the underworld to the journey that Anderson describes in The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. Dante-the-character's journey through the Paradiso with Beatrice as his guide might be likened to the stage of mourning that Anderson refers to as (5) Lifting.
Even though Dante-the-character's journey into and through the underworld is by far the lengthiest journey into the underworld in Western literature, it is not the first. In Virgil's epic poem the Aeneas, Virgil portrays Aeneas as journeying into the underworld, which is one reason why Dante-the-poet selected Virgil to be the guide for Dante-the-character in his journey through the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, as is well known, Virgil was deliberately constructing his Latin epic poem on the model of the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the underworld. For this reason, Virgil had to portray Aeneas as also visiting into the underworld.
In any event, a couple of years after Anderson had been abandoned by her first marital partner for another woman, she found her second marital partner. However, after being happily married to him for nine years, he died unexpectedly. For approximately two years, the ever-resourceful Anderson attended as many grief-support workshops as she could manage to attend, observing not only her own mourning processes but also the mourning processes of the others. After her own mourning process lifted, she wrote up her essay about her own mourning experience and the mourning experience of the others: "Suffering the Death of a Loved One" (2006), which she has made available at her website www.abandonment.net.
Since then, the ever-resourceful Anderson's journey through life has continued, and she has recently published a new book, Taming Your Outer Child: A Revolutionary Program to Overcome Self-Defeating Patterns (2011). Where does her inner resourcefulness come from? Freud told us that the ego is supposed to be in charge of adapting to reality. In light of Anderson's ability to adapt to such staggering realities as losing her first marital partner to another woman and then losing her second marital partner to death, she must have strong ego structures. Perhaps she should write an autobiography and tell us more about her earlier life. In terminology that I will explain below, I suspect that she does not have a lot of "shadow" forms of the archetypes of maturity circumscribing her ego-consciousness. For this reason, she is probably well suited to be a psychotherapist.
In both her book The Journey from Abandonment to Healing (2000) and her essay "Suffering the Death of a Loved One" (2006), Anderson works with a five-stage account of each of the two kinds of mourning processes. However, she does point out that there is a catch-22. In each sequence of five stages, she allows that we may proceed through certain stages in the sequence, but then fall back into an earlier stage. As a result, neither mourning process should be considered to proceed in a straightforward and linear sequence. In addition to being fond of working with a five-stage account of mourning, she is also fond of naming the five stages in each sequence so that the first letters of the five names create the acronym SWIRL. It turns out that she has renamed the first, third, and fourth stages in the second account of mourning bereavement due to a loved one's death. Here are the two five-stage sequences that she works with:
(1A) Shattering
(2A) Withdrawal
(3A) Internalizing
(4A) Rage
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