A loss of this magnitude - psychologically, it is a loss of the heroic defense - draws the psyche into liminality, which may be coloured most heavily by feelings of grief for a lost past. Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal imagos and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. It had been embedded in a context created and supported by an archetypal pattern of self-organisation, and now, since this matrix has dissolved or broken down, there is a sense of amputated past and a vague future. Yet while this ego hangs there in suspension, still it remembers the ghost of a former self, whose home had been furnished with the presence of persons and objects now absent and had been placed in a psychological landscape now bare and uninhabitable without them. There is memory, too, perhaps, of status, of secured supremacy amidst a host of valiant defenders of the realm. But now all is different.
Murray Stein, In Midlife
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