The Trauma of Loss

Definition of scientific phenomena should be based on the phenomena as we see them. We have no business to base our definition on ideas of what we think phenomena ought to be like. The quest for such touchstones seems to arise from a private conviction that simple laws and absolute distinctions necessarily underlie any connected set of phenomena.

C. F. A. PANTIN, The Relation between the Sciences

During the present century a number of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists have sought causal links between psychiatric illness, loss of a loved person, pathological mourning and childhood experience.

For several decades the sole starting point for these studies was a sick patient. Then, during the nineteen-forties, clinicians began to pay attention to the intense distress and emotional disturbance that immediately follow the experience of loss. In some of these later studies the loss was that of a spouse; in others it was that of a mother by a young child. Although each of these three starting points yielded findings of great interest, it was some years before the way that each set of data could be related to the others began to be appreciated. A constant difficulty was that generalizations made in connection with the earlier, retrospective, set were often misleading, whilst the theoretical explanations offered for them were ill-suited to both of the later, prospective, sets.

In this volume I seek to bring these diverse sets of data into relation with each other and to outline a theory that is applicable to them all. As in the two previous volumes, precedence is given throughout to data that derive from prospective studies.

Since loss as a field for enquiry is a distressing one the student is faced with emotional problems as well as intellectual ones.

Loss of a loved person is one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer. And not only is it painful to experience but it is also painful to witness, if only because we are so impotent to help. To the