To love someone holds the promise of overcoming existential loneliness. The death of a beloved, therefore, throws us back into existential
loneliness. People react with feelings of grief if they lose someone or something very valuable in their lives. Connected with those feelings of mourning are feelings of grief, anxieties, anger, rage, love, feelings of guilt, and others. If we allow ourselves to be taken over by those feelings, a process of mourning begins, a slow and painful developmental process, that allows us to separate from the departed and gives us the possibility again of getting on in life – without the deceased person, but with all the aspects that the relationship with this person have evoked in the own psyche, that which has been touched in our soul and what we must not sacrifice. We have to understand the loss of a beloved one in connection with bonding. If we engage with someone, a relationship develops and, in our psyche, a self is created out of the relationship. This communal self differs from the own self but there is also some overlapping. The existence of a good enough own self is important for the process of mourning and separation. In the grief process we reorganise ourselves from the communal self back to our own self. If the own self is not or not sufficiently accessible, those grieving react to a major loss with depression and accessory symptoms, meaning they react with a so-called complicated grief. In this case psychotherapy of depression, focussed on the communal self and the loss is often helpful.
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