Mourning as an Ethical Transformation: From Physical Omnipotence to Ethical Perfection

Vladimir Nemet

1. Why Psychotherapy Must Rediscover the Ideal

Psychoanalysis has long recognized that children do not experience their parents as they actually are. They experience them as beings who transcend ordinary human limits: strong, omnipotent, almost perfect. Yet psychoanalysis has never fully resolved what to do with this idealization. Should it be exposed, limited, deconstructed? Is growing up truly a matter of freeing oneself from the need for an Other who is greater and stronger than oneself?

This article begins with a different assumption: human beings do not outgrow their need for an ideal. They can only transform their idealization into another, more mature form of idealization. The need for an Other who transcends our limitations is not merely a remnant of childhood but one of the fundamental dimensions of human existence. Without someone we can admire, the world may remain functional, but it loses its meaning and its vertical dimension. It remains a space in which one can live, but it becomes increasingly difficult to find a reason why life is worth living.

From this perspective, the postmodernism of contemporary society, in which we are all immersed, can be understood as a vast cultural attempt to dismantle ideals, an attempt that in some ways resembles the strategy of modern psychoanalysis. Authorities have been exposed, grand narratives questioned, and hidden strategies of power uncovered beneath exalted values. Everything that once stood above humanity has been brought down to its level. The emperor has no clothes.

But what happens when there is nothing left that can stand above us?

2. Interpretation Is Not Enough

A similar difficulty arises in psychotherapy. Despite increasingly sophisticated interpretations, therapeutic processes can continue for years without convincing change. The client understands their attachments, recognizes their origins, and sees their archaic character, yet still cannot relinquish them.

Perhaps this is because they cannot do so without losing something far more important than their illusions. If the ideal is the only vertical dimension a person possesses, its destruction is not liberation. It can mean losing the very ground on which their life rests.

Perhaps, then, a different question needs to be asked. Is psychotherapy mistaken when it expects people to relinquish their ideals instead of helping them discover how those ideals might be transformed? What if the problem is not that the client still needs an idealized Other, but that they have not yet discovered a different form of that Other’s perfection?

This is precisely where the project of metamodern psychoanalysis begins. It does not propose abolishing the vertical dimension but transforming it. It does not claim that people should stop idealizing, but that they should discover what it is about the Other that truly deserves admiration.

The ideal cannot simply be abolished. It can only be transformed.

3. Transformation

This transformation leads from physical omnipotence to ethical perfection. A child admires a parent because the parent is stronger, more powerful, and better able to protect the child from the world. Yet through the process of mourning, a different possibility can gradually emerge: a parent does not have to be omnipotent to be great. Their greatness may reveal itself precisely when they are powerless to change the world, yet remain by the child’s side, care for them, and refuse to abandon them.

At that moment, a new kind of perfection becomes possible. It no longer rests on the idea that everything can be accomplished, but on the ethical capacity not to abandon another person even when nothing more can be done for them. The parent’s physical omnipotence gives way to ethical transcendence: we no longer admire the Other because they can do everything, but because their care transcends the limits of their power.

Metamodern psychoanalysis sees the possibility of psychological development precisely in this transformation. Not in a final liberation from idealization, but in the discovery of a new ideal; not in the destruction of the vertical dimension, but in its reestablishment on different foundations. The parent who was once ideal because they could do everything becomes ideal because they can care. And this care is not a sign of weakness. It is a new form of greatness.

Perhaps maturity does not begin when we stop needing a perfect Other, but when we discover that their deepest perfection lies precisely in their refusal to abandon us.

4. Mourning as a Transformation from Physical Omnipotence to Ethical Perfection

There comes a moment when a parent can no longer do anything to help us. They cannot change what has happened, remove our pain, or return the world to the state it was in before the loss. Their physical power has reached its limits. And yet they can remain beside the person who is suffering. They can care for them precisely when they can no longer save them.

Here the paradox of ethical perfection emerges: the Other becomes worthy of admiration precisely where their physical omnipotence ends.

The parent ceases to be omnipotent. But they need not cease to be great.

This brings us to the phenomenon of mourning. Classical psychoanalysis views mourning as a process through which loss, separation, and the limitations of the Other are accepted. According to Freud and others, mourning gradually frees us from our attachment to the Other.

Here, however, I propose a different definition of mourning. Mourning is not separation from the lost object, but the transformation of one form of idealization into another, more mature form. Mourning is the discovery of a new and different level of admiration for the world. The parent whom we loved for their strength can become an ideal because of their care.

At this moment, the meaning of omnipotence also changes. What once appeared to be absolute power over the world is transformed into an experience of the absolute value of an ethical relationship. This does not mean that care is literally omnipotent or that it can undo physical powerlessness. Rather, an ethical relationship can assume the place once occupied by the fantasy of physical omnipotence. Omnipotence does not disappear without a trace; its psychological function is transformed.

In this way, the possibility of a new selfobject emerges. It no longer needs to be idealized because it can do everything, but because, through its care, it embodies something that transcends the ordinary exchange of utility, power, and gratification. Its ethical perfection becomes the foundation of a new vertical dimension.

Ethical perfection reveals something else: even when nothing can be repaired, a relationship need not lose its value. Care does not defeat death, undo loss, or eliminate helplessness. Its greatness lies precisely in the fact that it does not have to overcome helplessness in order to remain worthy of admiration.

Mourning need not destroy the ideal. It can transform physical omnipotence into ethical perfection and thereby restore the vertical dimension on new foundations.

5. Why Understanding Is Not Enough

What can a person do who has never experienced parental care? What about someone who grew up with a parent they were supposed to idealize, but who did not know how to protect them, understand them, or remain by their side in moments of suffering? Such a person may carry the consequences of this deprivation for years in the form of depression, addiction, panic, or other psychological difficulties.

A person may seek comfort in religion: in Christ, an omnipotent ideal object who relinquishes his omnipotence in order to offer healing care. However, Christ never fully dies, and mourning therefore loses its full transformative power.

In psychotherapy, the client may come to understand his parents, recognize his own idealization, and become aware of his anger at having been disappointed. Yet understanding does not guarantee change. The old ideal may collapse without anything emerging in its place that could restore a sense of meaning. Omnipotence is then not transformed but disappears along with the ideal that sustained the person’s vertical dimension.

It is not enough to expose the illusion of omnipotence if a person has not yet experienced the greatness of care.

This is why the analyst acts not only through what they say but also through the way they are present. His task is not to prove that he is omnipotent, but to make possible an experience of a different kind of greatness: a form of care that does not promise to eliminate all suffering, yet does not abandon the other person in the face of their helplessness. In this way, the analyst can become a new idealized selfobject, not because they are perfect, but because the relationship with them opens up the possibility of experiencing the Other differently.

The analyst cannot change the past or compensate for everything that was missing in it. They can, however, enable the client to discover that the greatness of the Other does not depend on their ability to overcome every form of helplessness. Sometimes, it is precisely within a relationship that cannot eliminate suffering that something previously unimaginable becomes possible: the discovery that the Other can be worthy of admiration even when they cannot save us.

Here mourning and psychotherapy meet. In both cases, the old ideal must lose its absolute power so that a different dimension of its value can emerge. The point is not to renounce the need for an ideal, but to transform what can fulfill that need.

Metamodern psychoanalysis seeks to show how an ideal can be transformed from physical omnipotence into ethical perfection, expressed through care for the Other. In this way, meaning and transcendence are restored to human existence.

Perhaps the Other becomes greatest precisely when they can no longer do anything for us except remain by our side.

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