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Essay on The Experience of Being Lost

January 4, 2018 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

The word ‘Lost’ has many meanings and each meaning is different from each other. Lost implies loosing something or deeply absorbed in thought etc. Each and every person in this world has experienced the feeling that comes with being lost.

I have to say that the feeling is not pleasant but that doesn’t mean people don’t experience that or will stop experiencing that. Being lost means while travelling losing the way or so deep in thought that a person doesn’t know what is going on around them or loose themselves in them.

Everyone experience different types of feeling of being lost. Just like the fact that being lost has different meanings, like that each type of being lost has different feelings also and each feeling differ from each other vastly.

Here I will talk about only one type and that is going to be – loose my way while travelling. I am an adventurous person and like to roam around a lot.

This habit of mine got me in quite a lot of troubles and one of them is being lost while travelling at an unknown place. I never really thought that I will get lost as nowadays every phone has GPS system and because of that a person in 95% cases cannot get lost.

However considering my luck, my situation had to fall under that 5% of cases. People say that when a bad thing occurs, other bad things follow that and I had the unfortunate pleasure of proving that theory all by myself. I am lucky that nothing too bad happen to me. However, that does not means that I don’t have the experience of a life time of being lost.

Being the curious and adventurous person I am, I decided to take a stroll through the road in an unknown place all by myself. The scenery was breath taking and so I was hungrily looking at them and was doing my best to commit them in my memory.

While looking at the scenery, I naturally lost myself in its beauty. I kept on walking for a long time and the more I was walking; I noticed that the scenery keeps on getting much more beautiful. I never noticed that I had strayed from the road a long time ago and how far I went.

When I came to my senses, it was too late for me. I was already lost and had already walked quite a distance. At first I wasn’t panicking or freaking out. I realised that I was lost but I couldn’t blame myself because of the lovely scenery in front of me. At that point I also realised that nature can be so beautiful that it can actually make your heart hurt.

At that point I started panicking and hyperventilating. After doing that for a couple of minutes, I realised that it won’t help me get back and that I should calm down first. I was completely lost and there was no way I could contact anybody for help which means that I was all on my own.

I was scared and alone and didn’t know what I should do. Even after calming down, I couldn’t figure out that how I will get back. There were no ideas on my mind. In fact my mind was absolutely blank and my heart was beating so fast that I may have gotten a heart attack. I sat down under a tree and started crying. I was feeling absolutely helpless and didn’t know what to do.

After crying for some time, I forced myself to calm down. By that time the gravity of the situation had absolutely sank in and I realised that I got myself into this mess which means I will get myself out of it. After I steeled my resolve, I got up and started walking down the direction I came from.

After walking for about ten minutes, I realised that I have managed to get myself into another unknown place. At that time all I felt was that the bad luck was following me. I stopped walking and sat down to think about future course of action.

I checked my phone frequently in the hope that I will get network and figure out which direction I should walk in but nothing happen.

I got lucky about one thing which happened to be the fact that the sun won’t set before two hours so I had two hours to get back to my locality and I was sure that I walked for about 45 minutes. After realising that, I knew that I had hope. It was magical that how my brain started to work normally after that realisation.

I knew that I could only do a few things and which were to walk in any direction I like or to wait for the search party to come and rescue me or to somehow figure out where I am.

The second option is not the one I was willing to take and first one was too risky so I was left with the third option which seemed impossible. However, it was not. I then decided that I will walk for ten minutes in each direction and will try to listen in any sound that can indicate that the locality is that way or I should just climb up a tree.

The later sound appealing to me as being an adventurous person; I knew how to climb a tree. So then I went straight towards the sun for ten minutes and then climbed up a tree with a bit difficulty.

I am glad I did that because when I climbed up, I could see the top of a few houses in the direction I just came from. I laughed at myself with the thought that I just came in the exact opposite direction of what I should have taken.

After walking for one hour I finally reached the locality. I was extremely relieved. As a matter of fact, I was so relieved that I started to cry again. But this time the tears are of joy and of relief instead of being of fear and utter helplessness.

I recognised the place and went towards the place where I was staying with my family. The sun was still up barely and I felt like the sun was up only to show me the way and was waiting for me to reach home so that it can finally set.

When I reached, my family had no idea that I was missing for a few hours. When I asked them that where they thought I was, they said that they thought that I went for a walk and was clicking pictures of the nature. To say I was shocked will be an understatement.

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A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves

By maria popova.

Rebecca Solnit , whose mind and writing are among the most consistently enchanting of our time, explores this tender tango with the unknown in her altogether sublime collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost ( public library ).

Solnit writes in the opening essay:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

The inquiry itself carries undertones of acknowledging the self illusion , or at the very least brushing up against the question of how we know who “we” are if we’re perpetually changing . But for Solnit, as for Rilke , that uncertainty is not an obstacle to living but a wellspring of life — of creative life, most of all. Bridging the essence of art with the notion that not-knowing is what drives science , she sees in the act of embracing the unknown a gateway to self-transcendence:

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

But unlike the dark sea, which obscures the depths of what is, of what could be seen in the present moment, the unknown spills into the unforeseen. Solnit turns to Edgar Allan Poe, who argued that “in matters of philosophical discovery … it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely,” and considers the deliberate juxtaposition of the rational, methodical act of calculation with the ineffable, intangible nature of the unforeseen:

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

The poet John Keats captured this paradoxical operation elegantly in his notion of “negative capability,” which Solnit draws on before turning to another literary luminary, Walter Benjamin , who memorably considered the difference between not finding your way and losing yourself — something he called “the art of straying.” Solnit writes:

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

Even the word itself endured an unforeseen transformation, its original meaning itself lost amidst our present cult of productivity and perilous goal-orientedness :

The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los , meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.

Taking back the meaning of lost seems almost a political act, a matter of existential agency that we ought to reclaim in order to feel at home in ourselves. Solnit writes:

There’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost. […] Lost [is] mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry. The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.

During a recent vacation, I went horseback riding on a California ranch, home to a tight-knit equine community. Midway along the route, my horse glimpsed his peer across the field, carrying another rider on a different route, and began neighing restlessly upon the fleeting sight. Our guide explained that the horses, despite being extraordinarily intelligent beings, had a hard time making sense of seeing their friends appear out of nowhere, then disappear into the distance. Falling out of sight held the terror of being forever lost. My horse was calling out, making sure his friend was still there — that neither was lost. Underneath the geographic disorientation, one can imagine, lies a primal fear of losing control.

Despite the evolutionary distance, this equine disposition bears a disorienting similarity to the duality of our own relationship to the concept of lost — losing something we care about, losing ourselves, losing control — which Solnit captures beautifully:

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a sublime read in its entirety. Complement it with Where You Are , an exploration of cartography as wayfinding for the soul, then revisit Anaïs Nin on how inviting the unknown helps us live more richly .

— Published August 4, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/04/field-guide-to-getting-lost-rebecca-solnit/ —

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A visual essay by Jorge Losse

Being lost is the way to go, a vision by jorge losse.

Photography by Jorge Losse Words by Benjamin Ossa Edited by Bis Turnor & Laura Beneyto

Jorge Losse

Photographer and editor, keep exploring., this story is over but you can read the next travel experience..

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When Things Go Missing

A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

And then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. The next day, I left the keys to the house in the front door. A few days after that, warming up in the midday sun at an outdoor café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I’d been wearing, only to leave it hanging over the back of the chair when I headed home. When I returned to claim it, I discovered that I’d left my wallet behind as well. Prior to that summer, I should note, I had lost a wallet exactly once in my adult life: at gunpoint. Yet later that afternoon I stopped by a sporting-goods store to buy a lock for my new bike and left my wallet sitting next to the cash register.

I got the wallet back, but the next day I lost the bike lock. I’d just arrived home and removed it from its packaging when my phone rang; I stepped away to take the call, and when I returned, some time later, the lock had vanished. This was annoying, because I was planning to bike downtown that evening, to attend an event at Powell’s, Portland’s famous bookstore. Eventually, having spent an absurd amount of time looking for the lock and failing to find it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown instead. I parked, went to the event, hung around talking for a while afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outside into a lovely summer evening, and could not find the truck anywhere.

This was a serious feat, a real bar-raising of thing-losing, not only because in general it is difficult to lose a truck but also because the truck in question was enormous. The friend to whom it belonged once worked as an ambulance driver; oversized vehicles do not faze her. It had tires that came up to my midriff, an extended cab, and a bed big enough to haul cetaceans. Yet I’d somehow managed to misplace it in downtown Portland—a city, incidentally, that I know as well as any other on the planet. For the next forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night gradually lowered itself over downtown, I walked around looking for the truck, first on the street where I was sure I’d parked, then on the nearest cross streets, and then in a grid whose scale grew ever larger and more ludicrous.

Finally, I returned to the street where I’d started and noticed a small sign: “ No Parking Anytime .” Oh, shit. Feeling like the world’s biggest idiot, and wondering how much it was going to cost to extricate a truck the size of Nevada from a tow lot, I called the Portland Police Department. The man who answered was wonderfully affable. “No, Ma’am,” he veritably sang into the phone, “no pickup trucks from downtown this evening. Must be your lucky day!” Officer, you have no idea. Channelling the kind of advice one is often given as a child, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my thoughts amid the latest literary débuts, and then, to the best of my ability, retraced the entire course of my evening, in the hope that doing so would knock loose some memory of how I got there. It did not. Back outside on the streets of Portland, I spun around as uselessly as a dowsing rod.

Seventy-five minutes later, I found the truck, in a perfectly legal parking space, on a block so unrelated to any reasonable route from my house to the bookstore that I seriously wondered if I’d driven there in some kind of fugue state. I climbed in, headed home, and, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, decided that I needed to call my sister as soon as I walked in the door. But I did not. I could not. My cell phone was back at Powell’s, on a shelf with all the other New Arrivals.

My sister is a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., more conversant than most people in the mental processes involved in tracking and misplacing objects. That is not, however, why I wanted to talk to her about my newly acquired propensity for losing things. I wanted to talk to her because, true to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, she is the most scatterbrained person I’ve ever met.

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There is a runner-up: my father. My family members, otherwise a fairly similar bunch, are curiously divided down the middle in this respect. On the spectrum of obsessively orderly to sublimely unconcerned with the everyday physical world, my father and my sister are—actually, they are nowhere. They can’t even find the spectrum. My mother and I, meanwhile, are busy organizing it by size and color. I will never forget watching my mother try to adjust an ever so slightly askew picture frame—at the Cleveland Museum of Art. My father, by contrast, once spent an entire vacation wearing mismatched shoes, because he’d packed no others and discovered the mistake only when airport security asked him to remove them. My sister’s best T.S.A. trick, meanwhile, involved borrowing her partner’s laptop, then accidentally leaving it at an Alaska Airlines gate one week after 9/11, thereby almost shutting down the Oakland airport.

That’s why I called her when I started uncharacteristically misplacing stuff myself. For one thing, I thought she might commiserate. For another, I thought she might help; given her extensive experience with losing things, I figured she must have developed a compensatory capacity for finding them. Once I recovered my phone and reached her, however, both hopes vanished as completely as the bike lock. My sister was gratifyingly astonished that I’d never lost my wallet before, but, as someone who typically has to reconstruct the entire contents of her own several times a year, she was not exactly sympathetic. “Call me,” she said, “when they know your name at the D.M.V.”

Nor did my sister have any good advice on how to find missing objects—although, in fairness, such advice is itself difficult to find. Plenty of parents, self-help gurus, and psychics will offer to assist you in finding lost stuff, but most of their suggestions are either obvious (calm down, clean up), suspect (the “eighteen-inch rule,” whereby the majority of missing items are supposedly lurking less than two feet from where you first thought they would be), or New Agey. (“Picture a silvery cord reaching from your chest all the way out to your lost object.”) Advice on how to find missing things also abounds online, but as a rule it is useful only in proportion to the strangeness of whatever you’ve lost. Thus, the Internet is middling on your lost credit card or Kindle, but edifying on your lost Roomba (look inside upholstered furniture), your lost marijuana (your high self probably hid it in a fit of paranoia; try your sock drawer), your lost drone (you’ll need a specially designed G.P.S.), or your lost bitcoins (good luck with that). The same basic dynamic applies to the countless Web sites devoted to recovering lost pets, which are largely useless when it comes to your missing Lab mix but surprisingly helpful when it comes to your missing ball python. Such Web sites can also be counted on for excellent anecdotes, like the one about the cat that vanished in Nottinghamshire, England, and was found, fourteen months later, in a pet-food warehouse, twice its original size.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about lost entities and the Internet is that it has made many of them considerably easier to find: out-of-print books, elementary-school classmates, decades-old damning quotes by politicians. More generally, modern technology can sometimes help us find misplaced objects, as you know if you’ve ever had your girlfriend call your lost cell phone, or used that little button on your keys to make your Toyota Camry honk at you. Lately, we’ve seen a boom in technologies specifically designed to compensate for our tendency to lose stuff: Apple’s Find My iPhone, for instance, and the proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled tracking devices that you can attach to everyday objects in order to summon them from the ether, like the Accio spell in the “Harry Potter” books.

These tricks, while helpful, have their limitations. Your phone needs to be on and non-dead; your car needs to be within range; you need to have the foresight to stick a tracking device onto the particular thing you’re going to lose before you’ve lost it. Moreover, as anyone who’s ever owned a remote control can tell you, new technologies themselves are often infuriatingly unfindable, a problem made worse by the trend toward ever smaller gadgets. It is difficult to lose an Apple IIe, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cell phone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then, there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines. The only thing in the real or the digital world harder to keep track of than a password is the information required to retrieve it, which is why it is possible, as a grown adult, to find yourself caring about your first-grade teacher’s pet iguana’s maiden name.

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering. Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. (These figures seem preposterous until you reflect on all those times you holler up the stairs to ask your partner if she’s seen your jacket, or on how often you search the couch cushions for the pen you were just using, or on that daily almost-out-the-door flurry when you can’t find your kid’s lunchbox or your car keys.) Granted, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day . And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.

Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for why we lose all this stuff—one scientific, the other psychoanalytic, both unsatisfying. According to the scientific account, losing things represents a failure of recollection or a failure of attention: either we can’t retrieve a memory (of where we set down our wallet, say) or we didn’t encode one in the first place. According to the psychoanalytic account, conversely, losing things represents a success —a deliberate sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires. In “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Freud describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives,” including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from.” Freud’s colleague and contemporary Abraham Arden Brill put the matter more succinctly: “We never lose what we highly value.”

As explanations go, the scientific one is persuasive but uninteresting. It sheds no light on how it feels to lose something, and provides only the most abstract and impractical notion of how not to do so. (Focus! And, while you’re at it, rejigger your genes or circumstances to improve your memory.) The psychological account, by contrast, is interesting, entertaining, and theoretically helpful (Freud pointed out “the remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the motive for its being mislaid had expired”) but, alas, untrue. The most charitable thing to be said about it is that it wildly overestimates our species: absent subconscious motives, apparently, we would never lose anything at all.

That is patently false—but, like many psychological claims, impossible to actually falsify. Maybe the doting mother who lost her toddler at the mall was secretly fed up with the demands of motherhood. Maybe my sister loses her wallet so often owing to a deep-seated discomfort with capitalism. Maybe the guy who left his “Hamilton” tickets in the taxi was a Jeffersonian at heart. Freud would stand by such propositions, and no doubt some losses really are occasioned by subconscious emotion, or at least can be convincingly explained that way after the fact. But experience tells us that such cases are unusual, if they exist at all. The better explanation, most of the time, is simply that life is complicated and minds are limited. We lose things because we are flawed; because we are human; because we have things to lose.

Of all the lost objects in literature, one of my favorites appears—or, rather, disappears—in Patti Smith’s 2015 memoir, “M Train.” Although that book is ultimately concerned with far more serious losses, Smith pauses midway through to describe the experience of losing a beloved black coat that a friend gave her, off his own back, on her fifty-seventh birthday. The coat wasn’t much to look at—moth-eaten, coming apart at the seams, itself optimized for losing things by the gaping holes in each pocket—but, Smith writes, “Every time I put it on I felt like myself.” Then came a particularly harsh winter, which required a warmer jacket, and by the time the air turned mild again the coat was nowhere to be seen.

When we lose something, our first reaction, naturally enough, is to want to know where it is. But behind that question about location lurks a question about causality: What happened to it? What agent or force made it disappear? Such questions matter because they can help direct our search. You will act differently if you think you left your coat in a taxi or believe you boxed it up and put it in the basement. Just as important, the answers can provide us with that much coveted condition known as closure. It is good to get your keys back, better still to understand how they wound up in your neighbor’s recycling bin.

But questions about causality can also lead to trouble, because, in essence, they ask us to assign blame. Being human, we’re often reluctant to assign it to ourselves—and when it comes to missing possessions it is always possible (and occasionally true) that someone else caused them to disappear. This is how a problem with an object turns into a problem with a person. You swear you left the bill sitting on the table for your wife to mail; your wife swears with equal vehemence that it was never there; soon enough, you have also both lost your tempers.

Another possibility, considerably less likely but equally self-sparing, is that your missing object engineered its own vanishing, alone or in conjunction with other occult forces. Beloved possessions like her black coat, Patti Smith suggests, are sometimes “drawn into that half-dimensional place where things just disappear.” Such explanations are more common than you might think. Given enough time spent searching for something that was just there , even the most scientifically inclined person on the planet will start positing various highly improbable culprits: wormholes, aliens, goblins, ether.

That is an impressive act of outsourcing, given that nine times out of ten we are to blame for losing whatever it is that we can’t find. In the micro-drama of loss, in other words, we are nearly always both villain and victim. That goes some way toward explaining why people often say that losing things drives them crazy. At best, our failure to locate something that we ourselves last handled suggests that our memory is shot; at worst, it calls into question the very nature and continuity of selfhood. (If you’ve ever lost something that you deliberately stashed away for safekeeping, you know that the resulting frustration stems not just from a failure of memory but from a failure of inference. As one astute Internet commentator asked, “Why is it so hard to think like myself?”) Part of what makes loss such a surprisingly complicated phenomenon, then, is that it is inextricable from the extremely complicated phenomenon of human cognition.

This entanglement becomes more fraught as we grow older. Beyond a certain age, every act of losing gets subjected to an extra layer of scrutiny, in case what you have actually lost is your mind. Most such acts don’t indicate pathology, of course, but real mental decline does manifest partly as an uptick in lost things. Dementia patients are prone to misplacing their belongings, and people with early-stage Alzheimer’s often can’t find objects because they have put them in unlikely locations; the eyeglasses end up in the oven, the dentures in the coffee can. Such losses sadden us because they presage larger ones—of autonomy, of intellectual capacity, ultimately of life itself.

No wonder losing things, even trivial things, can be so upsetting. Regardless of what goes missing, loss puts us in our place; it confronts us with lack of order and loss of control and the fleeting nature of existence. When Patti Smith gives up on finding her black coat, she imagines that, together with all of the world’s other missing objects, it has gone to dwell in a place her husband liked to call the Valley of Lost Things. The shadow that is missing from that phrase darkens her memoir; in the course of it, Smith also describes losing her best friend, her brother, her mother, and that husband (at age forty-five, to heart failure).

On the face of it, such losses fit in poorly with lesser ones. It is one thing to lose a wedding ring, something else entirely to lose a spouse. This is the distinction Elizabeth Bishop illuminates, by pretending to elide it, in her villanelle “One Art,” perhaps the most famous reckoning with loss in all of literature. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she writes in the opening line; the trick is to begin with trivial losses, like door keys, and practice until you can handle those which are tragic. No one could take this suggestion seriously, and we aren’t meant to do so. Through its content as well as its form, the poem ultimately concedes that all other losses pale beside the loss of a loved one.

Moreover, although Bishop doesn’t make this point explicitly, death differs from other losses not only in degree but in kind. With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner. That’s why the defining emotion of losing things isn’t frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope. With people, by contrast, loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, it leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. Death is loss without the possibility of being found.

My father, in addition to being scatterbrained and mismatched and menschy and brilliant, is dead. I lost him, as we say, in the third week of September, just before the autumn equinox. Since then, the days have darkened, and I, too, have been lost: adrift, disoriented, absent. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that I have been at a loss —a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.

Like death more generally, my father’s was somehow both predictable and shocking. For nearly a decade, his health had been poor, almost impressively so. In addition to suffering from many of the usual complaints of contemporary aging (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease, congestive heart failure), he had endured illnesses unusual for any age and era: viral meningitis, West Nile encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder whose identity evaded the best doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. From there, the list spread outward in all directions of physiology and severity. He had fallen and torn a rotator cuff beyond recovery, and obliterated a patellar tendon by missing a step one Fourth of July. His breathing was often labored despite no evident respiratory problem; an errant nerve in his neck sometimes zapped him into temporary near-paralysis. He had terrible dental issues, like the impoverished child he had once been, and terrible gout, like the wealthy old potentate he cheerfully became.

He was, in short, a shambles. And yet, as the E.R. visits added up over the years, I gradually curbed my initial feelings of panic and dread—partly because no one can live in a state of crisis forever but also because, by and large, my father bore his infirmity with insouciance. (“Biopsy Thursday,” he once wrote me about a problem with his carotid artery. “Have no idea when the autopsy will be and may not be informed of it.”) More to the point, against considerable odds, he just kept on being alive. Intellectually, I knew that no one could manage such a serious disease burden forever. Yet the sheer number of times my father had courted death and then recovered had, perversely, made him seem indomitable.

As a result, I was not overly alarmed when my mother called one morning toward the end of the summer to say that my father had been hospitalized with a bout of atrial fibrillation. Nor was I surprised, when my partner and I got to town that night, to learn that his heart rhythm had stabilized. The doctors were keeping him in the hospital chiefly for observation, they told us, and also because his white-bloodcell count was mysteriously high. When my father related the chain of events to us—he had gone to a routine cardiology appointment, only to be shunted straight to the I.C.U.—he was jovial and accurate and eminently himself. He remained in good spirits the following day, although he was extremely garrulous, not in his usual effusive way but slightly manic, slightly off—a consequence, the doctors explained, of toxins building up in his bloodstream from temporary loss of kidney function. If it didn’t resolve on its own in a day or two, they planned to give him a round of dialysis to clear it.

That was on a Wednesday. Over the next two days, the garrulousness declined into incoherence; then, on Saturday, my father lapsed into unresponsiveness. Somewhere below his silence lurked six languages, the result of being born in Tel Aviv to parents who had fled pogroms in Poland, relocating at age seven to Germany (an unusual reverse exodus for a family of Jews in 1948, precipitated by limited travel options and violence in what was then still Palestine), and arriving in the United States, on a refugee visa, at the age of twelve. English, French, German, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew: of these, my father acquired the first one last, and spoke it with Nabokovian fluency and panache. He loved to talk—I mean that he found just putting sentences together tremendously fun, although he also cherished conversation—and he talked his way into, out of, and through everything, including illness. During the years of medical crises, I had seen my father racked and raving with fever. I had seen him in a dozen kinds of pain. I had seen him hallucinating—sometimes while fully aware of it, discussing with us not only the mystery of his visions but also the mystery of cognition. I had seen him cast about in a mind temporarily compromised by illness and catch only strange, dark, pelagic creatures, unknown and fearsome to the rest of us. In all that time, under all those varied conditions, I had never known him to lack for words. But now, for five days, he held his silence. On the sixth, he lurched back into sound, but not into himself; there followed an awful night of struggle and agitation. After that, aside from a few scattered words, some mystifying, some seemingly lucid—“Hi!”; “Machu Picchu”; “I’m dying”—my father never spoke again.

Even so, for a while longer, he endured—I mean his him-ness, his Isaac-ness, that inexplicable, assertive bit of self in each of us. A few days before his death, having ignored every request made of him by a constant stream of medical professionals (“Mr. Schulz, can you wiggle your toes?” “Mr. Schulz, can you squeeze my hand?”), my father chose to respond to one final command: Mr. Schulz, we learned, could still stick out his tongue. His last voluntary movement, which he retained almost until the end, was the ability to kiss my mother. Whenever she leaned in close to brush his lips, he puckered up and returned the same brief, adoring gesture that I had seen all my days. In front of my sister and me, at least, it was my parents’ hello and goodbye, their “Sweet dreams” and “I’m only teasing,” their “I’m sorry” and “You’re beautiful” and “I love you”—the basic punctuation mark of their common language, the sign and seal of fifty years of happiness.

One night, while that essence still persisted, we gathered around, my father’s loved ones, and filled his silence with talk. I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his dying flame. The room we were in was a cube of white, lit up like the aisle of a grocery store, yet in my memory that night is as dark and vibrant as a Rembrandt painting. We talked only of love; there was nothing else to say. My father, mute but alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, eyes shining with tears. I had always dreaded seeing him cry, and rarely did, but for once I was grateful. It told me what I needed to know: for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood.

All this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet—and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave. We had by then spent two vertiginous, elongated, atemporal weeks in the I.C.U. At no point during that time did we have a diagnosis, still less a prognosis. At every point, we were besieged with new possibilities, new tests, new doctors, new hopes, new fears. Every night, we arrived home exhausted, many hours past dark, and talked through what had happened, as if doing so might guide us through the following day. Then we’d wake up and resume the routine of the parking garage and the elevator and the twenty-four-hour Au Bon Pain, only to discover that, beyond those, there was no routine at all, nothing to help us prepare or plan. It was like trying to dress every morning for the weather in a nation we’d never heard of.

Eventually, we decided that my father would not recover, and so, instead of continuing to try to stave off death, we unbarred the door and began to wait. To my surprise, I found it comforting to be with him during that time, to sit by his side and hold his hand and watch his chest rise and fall with a familiar little riffle of snore. It was not, as they say, unbearably sad; on the contrary, it was bearably sad—a tranquil, contemplative, lapping kind of sorrow. I thought, as it turns out mistakenly, that what I was doing during those days was making my peace with his death. I have learned since then that even one’s unresponsive and dying father is, in some extremely salient way, still alive. And then, very early one morning, he was not.

What I remember best from those next hours is watching my mother cradle the top of my father’s head in her hand. A wife holding her dead husband, without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return, just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time: it was the purest act of love I’ve ever seen. She looked bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He did not yet look dead. He looked like my father. I could not stop picturing the way he used to push his glasses up onto his forehead to read. It struck me, right before everything else struck me much harder, that I should set them by his bed in case he needed them.

So began my second, darker season of losing things. Three weeks after my father died, so did another family member, of cancer. Three weeks after that, my home-town baseball team lost the World Series—an outcome that wouldn’t have affected me much if my father hadn’t been such an ardent fan. One week later, Hillary Clinton, together with sixty-six million voters, lost the Presidential election.

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom this fall could I distinguish my distress over these later losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when, at the second funeral, the son of the deceased stood up to speak, I wept. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop—that at any moment I would learn that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy.

For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of actual and anticipatory grief. I couldn’t stop conjuring catastrophes, political and otherwise. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. “So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and, as much as my specific sadness, it was just that—the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering—that undid me.

Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed—the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written—I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.

Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized I didn’t know how. I found some consolation in poetry, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write, not least because any piece I produced would be the first my father wouldn’t see. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt easy and right (calling my mother and my sister, curling up with my partner, playing with the cats), but these alone could not occupy the days. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.

It was during this time that I began to go out looking for my father. Some days, I merely said to myself that I wanted to get out of the house; other days, I set about searching for him as deliberately as one would go look for a missing glove. Because I find peace and clarity in nature, I did this searching outdoors, sometimes while walking, sometimes while out on a run. I did not expect, of course, that along the way I would encounter my father again in his physical form. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence—his voice, his humor, his warmth, the perfect familiarity of our relationship.

I have subsequently learned, from the academic literature on grief, that this “searching behavior,” as it is called, is common among the bereaved. The psychologist John Bowlby, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, regarded the second stage of grief, after numbness, as “yearning and searching.” But I had never knowingly engaged in it before, because, in my experience, my dead had always come looking for me . After other people I’d loved had died, I had often felt them near me, sometimes heard their voices, and even, on a few exceedingly strange occasions, been jolted into the uncanny conviction that I had encountered them again in some altered but unmistakable form. (This, too, turns out to be common among the grieving. “I never thought Michiko would come back / after she died,” the poet Jack Gilbert wrote of his wife in “Alone.” “It is strange that she has returned / as somebody’s dalmatian.”)

These experiences, to be clear, do not comport with my understanding of death. I don’t believe that our loved ones can commune with us from beyond the grave, any more than I believe that spouses occasionally reincarnate as Dalmatians. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all, and I had thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking I might find myself in my father’s company again.

The first time, I turned around after five minutes; I have seldom tried anything that felt so futile. After he lost his wife, C. S. Lewis, who had likewise previously felt the dead to be near at hand, looked up at the night sky and, to his dismay, knew that he would never find her anywhere. “Is anything more certain,” he wrote, in “A Grief Observed,” “than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?” Between his late wife and himself, he felt only “the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.”

Thus do I feel about my father. “Lost” is precisely the right description for how I have experienced him since his death. I search for him constantly but can’t find him anywhere. I try to sense some intimation of his presence and feel nothing. I listen for his voice but haven’t heard it since those final times he used it in the hospital. Grieving him is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.

This was perhaps the most striking thing about my father’s death and all that followed: how relevant the idea of loss felt, how it seemed at once so capacious and so accurate. And in fact, to my surprise, it was accurate. Until I looked it up, I’d assumed that, unless we were talking about phone chargers or car keys or cake recipes, we were using the word “lost” figuratively, even euphemistically—that we say “I lost my father” to soften the blow of death.

But that turns out not to be true. The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in forlorn. It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from a still more ancient word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century, we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and one another and has been steadily expanding ever since. In consequence, loss today is a supremely awkward category, bulging with everything from mittens to life savings to loved ones, forcing into relationship all kinds of wildly dissimilar experiences.

And yet, if anything, our problem is not that we put too many things into the category of loss but that we leave too many out. One night, during those weeks when I could find solace only in poetry, my partner read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” aloud to me. In it, Walt Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, exalting in all he sees. So expansive is his vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls but everyone else who makes the crossing: all those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, all those watching around him now, and all those who will be there watching after his death—which, in the poem, he doesn’t so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” he admonishes, kindly.

And, just like that, my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important thing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own. Like Whitman, his love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind—not just his family, whom he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.

It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too—our own ultimate unbeing—is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.

There’s precious little solace for this, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.

All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. ♦

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Getting Lost—and Found—in Personal Narrative

The ways of getting lost are no doubt infinite, but here are three, with prompts, that provide ample exploration in personal narrative:

Lost in a New Place

In her essay, “Typical First Year Professor” from Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014), Roxane Gay writes about moving to a small midwestern city to take her first full-time teaching job. She gets lost in her new building and must adapt and redefine herself in a setting very different from what she left behind:

I have an office I don’t have to share with two or four people. My name is on the engraved panel just outside my door. My name is spelled correctly. I have my own printer. The luxury of this cannot be overstated. I randomly print out a document; I sigh happily as the printer spits it out, warm. I have a phone with an extension, and when people call the number, they are often looking for me. There are a lot of shelves, but I like my books at home. In every movie I’ve ever seen about professors, there are books. I quickly unpack three boxes, detritus I accumulated in graduate school—sad drawer trash, books I’ll rarely open again—but I’m a professor now. I must have books on display in my office. It is an unspoken rule.

Gay’s arrival changes the landscape for her students, too. “Students don’t know what to make of me. I wear jeans and Converse. I have tattoos up and down my arms. I’m tall. I am not petite. I am the child of immigrants. Many of my students have never had a black teacher before. I can’t help them with that.” She clarifies that what’s unfamiliar to her students is not new to her. “I’m the only black professor in my department.” Although this aspect of her landscape is unchanged and unlikely to change, Gay acclimates to her new world and “finds” a transformed self in this new environment.

Think of a time when you started a new job or moved to a new place. List physical aspects of the setting that differed from where you’d been before. How did those differences represent who you were expected to be in the new place?

Bonus Prompt:

What physical traits such as attire, gender, body shape, mannerisms, skin color, ornamentation, did others see as unfamiliar? How did those differences affect your sense of belonging? What, if anything, helped you and others appreciate those differences?

Lost on the Way to a New Place

Sometimes we get lost travelling to a new place. In her essay, “Dear Mother,” from Dear Memory: Essays on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021) , Victoria Chang contemplates her mother’s loss of homeland when, as a child, she relocated with her family from China to Taiwan. In epistle form, the narrator writes, “I would like to know if you took a train. If you walked. If you had pockets in your dress. If you wore pants. If your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone.” Through Chang’s questions, we see the family’s exodus as disorienting, possibly frightening for a child, and how she might have carried something to remind her of home. “I would like to know if you thought the trees were black or green at night, if it was cold enough to see your breath, to sting your fingers. I would like to know who you spoke to along the way. If you had some preserved salty plums, which we both love, in your pocket.” The questions connect Chang with her mother but also reveal how the mother’s later move to the United States resulted in Chang’s lost connection with her extended family:

I would like to know where you got your food for the trip. Why I never knew your mother, father, or your siblings. I would like to have known your father. I would like to know what his voice sounded like. If it was brittle or pale. If it was blue or red. I would like to know the sound he made when he swallowed food. I would like to know if your mother was afraid.

Draft a letter to someone from your past whose journey entailed loss. This could be to a loved one who journeyed from life to death, or a relative sentenced to prison, or a friend who left home. Ask about what they saw, heard, smelled, ate, or carried.

In your letter, list the things you would like to know. Begin with physical details about the journey while allowing room for what you may have lost as a result of their departure.

Lost in a Familiar yet Changed Place

Sometimes we don’t go anywhere at all, but major life events make familiar places feel utterly foreign. In her essay, “ Still Life ” ( Brevity , Issue 62), Joanne Nelson writes of the last time she visited her brother Dale at his cabin:

A still life: barefoot, shirt but no pants, beer bottles and cigarettes and ashtray within reach. Even the smells suspended, unwashed, motionless. Piled mail. The place hazy with cigarette smoke.

Though the narrator cleans and cooks for her sick brother, no attempts to return the cabin to its previous state will return her brother to his previous state. She becomes “lost” in a space altered by illness, but the psychological act of getting lost occurs when the narrator becomes immersed in grief. Five years after his death, when a server calls out “Dale” in a diner, Nelson lists what’s missing, what she misses, what she’s lost:

I’d like to see him cross the foyer of rustling people-filled benches though, have him share in this Sunday morning buzzing energy. Hear him complain about the wait, feel his pockets for smokes, say “don’t give me that look” before stepping outside.

Write about a familiar place that felt altered after a major life event. Note the physical details—what’s new, missing, or altered—that demonstrate how the place, and therefore your life, has changed.

Bonus Prompt :

List odd, quirky, or everyday things you’d never have guessed you’d miss—things you might never see again but are, in their own way, happy reminders of what was special about that time. Alternatively, list things you’ll never miss. For example, stale hamburger buns, cracked lunch trays, and sitting alone in your high school cafeteria.

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry collections  Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown , shortlisted for Jane’s Stories Press Foundation’s Clara Johnson Award in Women’s Literature, and  Diary of the One Swelling Sea , winner of a Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry, plus the chapbooks  Pendulum  and  Borderlines . Jill is the founder of Wandering Aengus Press and teaches Creative Writing for Skagit Valley College. Recent works can be found in  Slate ,  Fourth Genre ,  Waxwing ,  The Brooklyn Review ,  Gulf Stream ,  Diode , and  terrain.org . You can read more at  JillMcCabeJohnson.com/writing .

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Freudian Psychology

How we can be transformed by loss, the loss of a cherished relationship can reshape us in significant ways..

Updated April 3, 2024 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• What Is Freudian Psychology?
• Find a therapist near me
• Not only death, but also estrangement or detachment from a person we value may alter our direction in life.
• Awareness of someone's absence may disrupt our sense of self, stability, and belonging.
• A cherished relationship that is lost may be silently held.

Just as Polaris—the North Star—is a fixed destination in the northern sky, a guiding directional light for navigators and a metaphorical beacon of hope, relationships are also an anchor or watchtower that maintain our heading amid the changes that happen in life. A loss that deters us from where we are headed does not only involve death. Detachment from a significant relationship or estrangement from a person we value are losses that may dramatically alter our direction.

The awareness that someone is missing outside our being conflicts with memories of their presence that contribute to our self-definition (Singer & Blagov, 2004). Along with this loss, our identity , self-esteem , and aspirations no longer exist in relation to a familiar living being. We must change our direction.

Becoming Lost in Loss

When we are lost in response to loss, we may not know which way to go, where to turn, or what to do. We may feel vulnerable, exposed, or alone. We may yearn for the times when our path and identity seemed more defined. The pronounced awareness of someone’s absence may disrupt our sense of self, stability, and belonging. Disorientation and emptiness can result from discrepancies between memories of a loved one and their current absence (Lamia, 2022). The sense of being lost may also result from the changed meanings in our lives. The meanings have changed implicitly as well as explicitly. Explicit meanings are those within our conscious awareness. Implicit meanings are those we feel but do not have words; we sense the meanings in our bodies.

Internal Dialogues

Loss can activate creative internal dialogues. In some instances, grievers may construct fantasies that restore the lost connection, creating scenarios that the person is still with them. As we slowly adapt to life without someone’s presence, we may be prompted to consider who we are outside the context of that relationship. Yet some grievers silently keep a cherished relationship near to their hearts and do not divulge the secret ways they maintain their bonds or how, internally and in painful ways, the relationship, as well as the loss, has altered their inner experience.

A Secret: Even Freud Became Lost in Loss

Late in his life, Sigmund Freud expressed strong sentiments about his own experience of loss and how it altered him. However, many mental health professionals may be unaware of how this impacted Freud and led him to revise his theories about loss and mourning.

Freud’s (1917) early conceptualization of loss proposed that mourning is time-limited. He theorized that when a loved one dies, the mourner repeatedly confronts the reality of the loss, gradually withdraws psychic energy invested in the deceased and attached to memories and hopes related to the deceased until a final detachment enables the person’s ego to become free and uninhibited again. This was the recipe for psychoanalysts to treat grievers; namely, that the griever works through the loss and gets over it. At the time, Freud was developing his theory of narcissism, and he was exploring melancholia as a narcissistic disorder. Thus, he believed that people who experience melancholia from a current loss must have had an ambivalent relationship with someone who was lost earlier in life.

Yet loss of an emotional connection requires cognitive reorganization that will help the person find ways to connect similarly with others. However, replacing someone we have been deeply attached to isn't easy. Many studies based on attachment theories indicate that people for whom deep attachment and dependency fostered a sense of emotional security are most vulnerable to grief problems when the person with whom they were entwined dies or disappears from their life (Fraley & Bonanno, 2004; Maccallum & Bryant, 2008).

What led Freud to alter his theories involved his own experience of loss, namely the loss of his grandchild, Heinele. But preceding the loss of his grandchild, Freud’s youngest daughter, Sophie, died of Spanish flu in 1920. Freud was not nearly as attached to his daughter Sophie as he was to Sophie’s child, Heinele. So, when Sophie died, Freud applied a bit of his erroneous early theory about loss and mourning to himself. In a letter to his friend, Sandor Ferenzi, Freud wrote, “I work as much as I can, and am thankful for the diversion. The loss of a child seems to be a serious, narcissistic injury; what is known as mourning will probably follow only later” (2000a, p. 6). Freud’s comments regarding his daughter’s death are intellectualized and far removed from what one would expect from a grief-stricken parent.

Yet Freud's very strong attachment to his grandchild led him to clearly express grief when Heinele died from tuberculosis in June 1923. In a letter to Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, three years later, in 1926, Freud revealed that since his grandson’s death, he “no longer [found] enjoyment in life” (Freud, 2003). Five years after the loss, Freud professed in a letter to Ernest Jones that he “became tired of life permanently” since his grandson died (Freud, 2000b). The loss of his close relationship with the child led him to consider the extreme painfulness of mourning and recognize the endlessness of normal grieving (Clewell, 2004).

Relationships with others shape who we are, whether they are early or later in our lives. When a deep bond is severed through loss, as Freud himself experienced, it can fundamentally challenge our beliefs, understanding of ourselves, and place in the world. We do not necessarily come out of a loss experience with greater learning or meaning, although that would be our hope. Psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes (2015) described the pain of grief as “just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.”

[This post is excerpted in part from my book, Grief Isn't Something to Get Over: Finding a Home for Memories and Emotions After Losing a Loved One . ]

Clewell, T. (2004). Mourning beyond melancholia: Freud’s psychoanalysis of loss. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52(1), 43–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651040520010601

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud : Volume XIV (1914–1916). On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, Papers on metapsychology and other works (pp. 237–258). Hogarth.

Freud, S. (2000a). Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, January 29, 1920. In P. T. Hoffer (Trans.), The correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi : Vol. 3. 1920–1933 (p. 6). Belknap Press.

Freud, S. (2000b). Letter from Sigmund Freud to Ernest Jones, March 11, 1928. In P. T. Hoffer (Trans.), The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939 (pp. 643–644). Belknap Press.

Freud, S. (2003). Letter from Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger, November 29, 1926. In G. Fichtner & L. Binswanger (Eds.), The Sigmund Freud–Ludwig Binswanger correspondence 1908–1938 (pp. 185–186). Other Press.

Lamia, M. (2022). Grief isn’t something to get over: Finding a home for memories and emotions after losing a loved one . American Psychological Association LifeTools Books.

Parkes, C. M. (2015). The price of love: The selected works of Colin Murray Parkes . Routledge.

Singer, J. A., & Blagov, P. (2004). The integrative function of narrative processing: Autobiographical memory, self-defining memories, and the life story of identity. In D. R. Beike, J. M. Lampinen, & D. A. Behrend (Eds.), The self and memory (pp. 117–138). Psychology Press.

Mary C. Lamia , Ph.D. , is a clinical psychologist in Marin County, California.

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