Klein on Mourning

not straight, but in waves It seems every advance in the process deepens the subject’s relations to inner objects, happiness in regaining them after feeling adrift and lost, an increased trust because they appear good and helpful after all, as in the child step by step, building his relations to external objects, gaining not only from things pleasant, but from ways in which the child overcomes frustrations . . . Mrs. A, for instance: finally walking down familiar streets with a friend: an attempt at old bonds. Yet moments into the stroll the number of bustling people is too much, the buildings strange, the sunlight artificial, bleak . . . so that she has to retreat indoors into a restaurant for a chair, but even there the walls are buckling, the diners and waiters blurred— indifferent to what she carries inside, her home suddenly the only tolerable place— pictures of her boy, his drawings, in each and every room.