Notes on Abandonment, Loss, and Vulnerability

Over the years I have had, and continue to work with, patients, directly or through supervised analyses, who were actually abandoned totally and permanently for critical periods of their childhood, or adopted at birth, abandoned by a divorced parent who did not obtain custody, abandoned when one or both parents suicided when the patient was a young child, deserted by a parent, placed in an orphanage or foster home because of economic issues, suffered the institutionalization of one or both parents institutionalized for serious emotional illness, felt they were abandoners either because of giving up newborns for adoption or inducing abortion, who divorced, felt they were abandoning their elderly parents by placing them in nursing homes, gave pets up for adoption or “put them away,” lived with one or both depressed parents where there was no physical separation but there was emotional abandonment or threat of it. These latter patients usually are more damaged than those who suffered an actual parent loss through death and subsequently were cared for by others who were involved and caring, widows who find they are abandoned by their friends who suddenly see them as sexual competitors (unlike attitudes toward widowers in our society), the dying patient abandoned by his or her “loved ones” in a hospital,