Abstract
Through a bibliographical research, this article aims to understand how the mourning process occurred among relatives of persons who either disappeared or were killed for political reasons during the 1964 Military Dictatorship, which, using the National Security Doctrine, made these militants disappear, causing a traumatic hiatus in the heart of the family, which had to cope with the emptiness left by the disappeared person/disappearance. Knowing that processing the mourning requires objectification of death - identification of the dead body and rites of passage from life to death -, we suppose there is difficulty in this possibility of processing the mourning. Identified with Freud’s work Mourning and Melancholia, we follow the two paths he presented, with no intention of covering all human complexity regarding the forms of suffering in mourning, namely: mourning and its possibility of reinvestment of libido; and the paths of melancholy, which paralyzes the subject and prevents him from making new drive-related investments. Following in the footsteps of the father of Psychoanalysis, we observed in relatives of persons disappeared for political reasons that melancholy paralyzes the subject in a mortifying state, while in mourning some movement is possible.
Keywords:
mourning; trauma; forced disappearance