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In a previous Substack, I looked at the difference between a separation and a loss: some sort of registration needs to take place to transform the one into the other. Along the way, a number of psychical processes can occur, including what are known as ‘anniversary reactions’.
Freud became aware of this when working with his patient Elizabeth von R, described in his ‘Studies on Hysteria’. “This lady”, he wrote, “celebrated annual festivals of remembrance at the period of her various catastrophes, and on these occasions her vivid visual reproduction and expressions of feeling kept to the date precisely”. She would cry intensely on the anniversary of her husband’s death, without any conscious awareness of the fact that it was the anniversary.
The psychoanalyst George Pollock described the case of a young woman whose father had died suddenly when she was thirteen. She described a daily depression which began at 5.30pm when her husband got back from work. The feelings would emerge at the moment she heard the key turning in the lock. In her analysis, she realised that as a child she had excitedly waited for her father’s return from work each day. Although she had apparently denied his death, her afternoon depressions marked the memory of her father’s return.
In another case, a man’s depression would appear with greatest intensity on Tuesday afternoons, the day of his mother’s death when he was fourteen. Such anniversary reactions are amazingly common, yet most often go unnoticed since the person is unaware of the link themselves and the doctor or therapist may not be alert to the unconscious processes at play.
