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Everyone experiences loss in the course of a lifetime, both of loves and of treasures. I hold that the way in which an individual adapts to a loss will determine, to a considerable degree, the direction his
or her life will take subsequent to the loss.1 Different types of identification with an aspect or function of someone loved and/or hated who has been lost, and defenses against such identifications, can—in the course of the mourning process—alter the mental representation not only of the lost one but also of the mourner him/herself. In some cases, such processes may stimulate and enhance the motivations and directions of creativity. On the other hand, the mourning process may be stymied by complications arising from certain factors: the mourner's intrapsychic structure, the intrapsychic meaning that the loss represents to the mourner, and the circumstances that were involved in the loss. Thus, the phenomena of intrapsychic accommodation to loss can be seen on a spectrum that ranges from psychopathology to the enrichment of a creative potential.
Furthermore, the psychology of adapting to the loss of a specific love, treasure, or hope cannot be understood without recognizing what I call "developmental losses and gains," as exemplified by the "loss" of the mother's breast when the baby begins to take solid food, or giving up the parent of the opposite sex as a fantasied incestuous object after resolution of the oedipus complex. Youngsters unconsciously follow this pattern when they loosen their emotional ties to the mental representations of the parents of their childhood in order to be able to identify with a peer-group network: Wolfenstein2 indicates that the adolescent passage involves a kind of mourning, in accordance with this p