ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the multilayered consequences of childhood parental loss. It elucidates the life-long struggles and vulnerabilities of individuals whose parents have died early on in their lives. The realms which long-term consequences of this trauma affect are those of aggression, narcissism, love and sexuality, subjective experience of time, and attitudes toward one’s own mortality. A more central issue is the intrapsychic relationship the ‘orphan’ maintains with his or her lost parent. Never fully relinquished, this internal object representation exerts a powerful influence on the individual, an influence that can be pathogenic or salutary. The balance of outcome depends upon a large number of factors, including the age at which the loss occurred, the nature of the relationship with the parent before he or she died, the constitutional talents of the child, the degree of love and reliability offered by the surviving parent and/or substitute parental figure(s), the availability of health-promoting role models, the monetary stability of the family, and the degree to which those around the child were willing and/or able to facilitate his mourning of the loss. All this has consequences for the treatment of adults who have lost one or both parents during childhood; these are highlighted in this chapter.
