ABSTRACT
The question of loss shares its origins with the birth of humanity itself. In the Bible, Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise and condemned to earn their bread by daily toil, all earthly life originating from a loss. In our culture, we have moved from biblical tradition to individual myth, in which the child who is born loses the union with the mother. Psychoanalysis proposes that loss is an occurrence repeated throughout infancy: weaning, toilet training, dentition, the first steps, and the first words, these all represent ways to articulate loss, as the child gradually grows and moves away from the beginnings of life. While the factors that constitute identity draw on their transgenerational and generational origins, the work of identity takes place through the life events through which we articulate our destiny and which shake our initial identity structure with varying degrees of intensity.
