ABSTRACT
The central idea in this chapter is that out of loss can come the creative impulse. Moreover, attending to the vicissitudes of the affective responses to loss may help us to distinguish between the destructive and more creative sequelae of loss. Loss in real and metaphorical ways, as we know, provokes anger, guilt, and sadness. The grief of loss is a complex state of mind with different lengths of duration, and in each individual shows different mixes of other constituent affects, such as anger, guilt, shame, mixed with envy and jealousy as well as frequently accompanying depression with varying degrees of somatic disruptions. Each person has a different threshold of defences against depression, among which the manic defence is the most characteristic.
