Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting, cultivating creativity and freedom of thought and feeling. We invite you to engage with our presenters and community as they share their interests and passions in conversation on current topics in psychoanalysis.

This free event that alternates times. The meeting often begins with a 45 minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of conversation. When an event is recorded you can access the recording at the vault.

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The Never Was describes a complicated aspect of mourning that has received comparatively little attention. Most work on mourning focusses upon losses that are tangible, such as the death of a loved one. The “Never Was” is my term for situations where one’s life has been so disrupted that its course has been irrevocably altered. The pain of this profound and at times violent spoliation results in a hard dissociation. The Never Was encompasses the need to mourn a life that was never lived out as one thought it should have been. One result is feeling that the old life, the life that was supposed to be, never was. As such, a person then comes to live out a ghost life, a life that cannot be fully inhabited, because it isn’t the life that was supposed to be. Indeed, the Never Was, the life that isn’t, becomes a shapeless specter, not fully thought, but always present as an absence. The Never Was is dissociated because experiencing the magnitude of the loss would cause deep and overwhelming pain. Mourning this loss becomes psychically dangerous since it threatens to unleash the pain, the deep sadness, and the anger that needs to be mourned.

The Never Was is an extreme aspect that is inherent in all losses to some extent. A loss always includes what might have been but can never be. However, the Never Was is distinguished from other losses by its severity, the global nature of the upheaval, and the extreme rupture in continuity that results.

I will discuss the case of patient whose life was upended by a sudden placement in residential care as a young adolescent. She remained in various residential and hospital programs for 15 years. During that time, she lived a regimented life. She was subjected to what was at times coercive treatment. In care, she lost no fewer than 17 friends to suicide, homicide, and terminal illness. Upon her discharge, she was expected to lead a “normal” life—with no skills to live independently, no diploma, few friends and no job experience. I will illustrate our therapeutic work with the Never Was that she has only recently begun to recognize, and the deep, unbound pain that makes such mourning so complicated.