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← Back to blogThe Grief We Have Carried Since Birth: Our Incompleteness and Learning to Live
From a psychoanalytic perspective, our fundamental task is to mourn: from the moment we are born, we mourn our incompleteness.
Leonardo da Vinci noted in his notebooks: "While I thought I was learning how to live, I was learning how to die." In the original: "Quando io crederò imparare a vivere, e io imparerò a morire."
The framework I describe in my book Şairler ve Psikoterapistler Gözüyle Yas (Grief Through the Eyes of Poets and Psychotherapists) is this: psychoanalysis holds that our fundamental predicament is having been born. The sense of wholeness in the womb disappears at birth; the infant has lost a part of themselves, a sense of completeness, and cries to attain a wholeness they have never had. In Lacanian thought, the first thing a human being encounters is not their mother, but the lack in themselves and in the other. This is our fundamental predicament, too. We keep searching for that wholeness, yet that wholeness does not exist.
This is why mourning is not confined to funerals. Every separation, every act of letting go calls forth grief; from a psychoanalytic perspective, every experience of mourning is another layer of accepting our fundamental lack. In Kohut's theory, optimal frustrations are necessary for the development of psychic structure: a child who copes with such frustration builds an internal structure that sustains them, and without it, maturation remains incomplete. This is a theoretical perspective, not a measurement.
A widely used framework in bereavement research suggests that people oscillate between turning toward the loss and re-engaging with life; one qualitative study found this oscillation itself to be instructive, highlighting acceptance, learning, time, and context. An internal bond with the deceased may continue, but findings on the effects of this bond are inconsistent. As a saying attributed to the Bektashi tradition has it, rather than saying "they died," people would say, "they flowed from my eyes into my heart."
Learning to live means learning to live with incompleteness.
This content does not constitute diagnostic or treatment advice and is not a substitute for an individual assessment. If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, contact a mental health professional, 112, or ALO 183.
References: Yaşar AB. Şairler ve Psikoterapistler Gözüyle Yas. Nobel Akademik, 3. basım, 2024. · Leonardo da Vinci, defterlerinden. · Trumpeter ve ark. (2008), The Journal of Genetic Psychology 169(1):51-71. · Root ve Exline (2014), Death Studies 38(1):1-8. · Larsen ve ark. (2025), Death Studies 49(6):743-754.