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Object constancy is a skill that smaller children have not yet learned. When mommy leaves, it is as if she is gone forever, and the small child will weep inconsolably, in what is often called “separation anxiety.” Luckily, most small children are also unable to keep the image of mommy leaving in their awareness for very long, and are easily distracted by other events. It takes some time for the child to learn how to keep an associated image of mommy with them, so that they can retain the feeling of the comfort and security of the relationship when she is gone for a while.
As the foregoing shows, whether or not a person thinks of someone as absent or present is independent of “reality,” and whether an outside observer would say that there is an ongoing relationship or not. It is only dependent on how the person represents the loved person in their mind, and this is the key to the grief resolution process.
The essence of this process is to teach this important skill to someone who is grieving about someone who is now represented as separate and gone. Since there is a great deal of variation in exactly how an individual person represents someone as either lost or present, we first have to gather some information to find out exactly how this particular person does it.
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