The place of language and lack thereof in the grieving process

The grieving process cannot be understood solely as an emotional response to the loss of someone or something significant. From the perspective of structural psychoanalysis, mourning is intertwined with the very constitution of the human subject, traversed by language and a series of lacks that structure it from before any concrete experience.

Understanding the place of language and the function of lack allows us to approach mourning beyond actual loss, revealing its resonance with the way we are psychically made.

Language as a structure of subjectivity

Human subjectivity does not arise spontaneously; it is constructed from the moment we enter language. We are not simply biological beings who later learn to speak, but rather we constitute ourselves as subjects to the extent that we are spoken by a language that precedes us. This means that language not only communicates, but also organizes thought, structures identity, and defines our bonds with others.

Every word we utter or hear carries a symbolic, social, and unconscious charge that represents us, names us, and also separates us. In this sense, language introduces a split: we can never say everything, nor be completely what we say.

This impossibility of complete coincidence between being and language marks a structural deficiency that defines what it means to be human. Therefore, talking about grief is not only talking about pain for what has been lost, but also about how that pain is inscribed in a subject already constituted by loss.

The “constitutive deficiencies” of human beings and their relationship with grief

Before any specific loss, we are already marked by two fundamental deficiencies: the impossibility of appropriating language (because it is always foreign to us, precedes us, and is never completely ours) and the condition of being sexual beings, that is, beings for whom reproduction and death are inevitable realities.

These “constitutive deficiencies”—that of language and that of immortality—are at the root of subjective experience. Living, loving, learning, desiring—all of these are permeated by the impossibility of having everything, of being complete, of mastering time or meaning.

That is why, when a real loss occurs, such as a death or a breakup, it activates and actualizes this primary lack within us: we not only lose the other, but we also rediscover what we have always lacked.

How a concrete loss activates fundamental unconscious losses

A loss in reality (a loved one, a relationship, a role) can have a greater impact than expected because it is not only about what is lost outside, but also about what it represents within the psychic apparatus.

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