Loss

 I have reached an age when a great many things seem to end, or have ended. The man at the market who always sold cheese has retired, the owner of the café has sold up, the kids who used to play outside now have kids of their own. Friends die. Necessarily things change and each of us is called upon to deal with loss.

Dynamics change each time something is gone, a new balance has to be found.

So I go back to Freud.

You have to admit that Freud was a genius, whether you like him or not.

... it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them...

How recognisable this is. We all want things to continue. Unless of course we are in a situation of deep unhappiness - but even then...  wouldn't it be true to say that we want things to be the way they were, before we became unhappy. The betrayal undone, the loss not lost, or whatever makes us unhappy gone, to take us back to the way things were before, to continue as we were. Those endless 'if only's. Even though on a conscious level we know that we cannot turn back. Remember Lot's wife. We still long, pine, cry out for, yearn for, dream of what we have lost. We rarely just mourn, we often fall into melancholia, or depression.

Freud again:

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

There are life changing moments, thresholds we didn't want to cross but did, things lost despite our best efforts, friends lost, family members gone. None of us is left unscathed.

What we fear isn't change. What we fear is loss.

It takes courage, grit and perseverance to accept a world that is not longer what it was. This is just as true in organisations as in personal relationships. Think of it, our relationship with an organisation is not with an organisation, but with the people in it.

And what if we lose a house? Or our belongings? What does it do to us? How does that change our idea of ego, our sense of self, and how we see ourselves?

Want to know more? Download Freud's Mourning and Melancholia