The external and the inner influences which discernibly evoke despair prove to have a common denominator—the experience of loss. In a previous paper (1959), I attempted to show some of the significant effects of such a loss in various periods of psychological development. Why loss should have such a profound influence throughout life is the subject of this paper.

Loss refers here, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, to object loss, a desired relationship to another person who had to be abandoned. The object2 may represent or be substituted by some abstraction or may even be represented or substituted as a desired