Healing Estranged Sorrows Through Narrative, Imaginal, and Mythic Amplification

Abstract

When children are raised in environments that lack important elements of supportive care needed for developing a healthy identity, it results in a kind of “loss” of what is archetypally expected but never received. This category of loss, which I call estranged sorrow, is not accounted for in the current literature of loss related to grief related to known losses. Most approaches to trauma are similar in emphasizing what happens based on events and neglecting on the trauma that results from developing in an environment without emotionally available caregivers. In this article, a theoretical essay, I work within the framework of depth psychology to trace how estranged sorrows might originate in our culture. I then use the method of amplification to provide three different ways that the productive imagination can be harnessed as a vital resource: narrative amplification, imaginal amplification, and mythic amplification. I explore how the imagination enables a grieving process that connects sorrow with words and images that can then be processed as a conscious experience, and ultimately allowed to become part of the biographical past rather than an unvoiced present.

1. Introduction

By discussing estranged sorrows, this article provides a way to recognize the absence of certain psychologically important relationships and experiences as a traumatic form of loss that needs to be grieved. Naming this phenomenon provides clarifying language around experiences of absence trauma (Amias, 2024), which relates to trauma resulting from prolonged exposure to a lack of psychologically necessary care, and other kinds of trauma not connected to a particular event and whose influence occurs beyond a person’s conscious awareness. The creation of the category of estranged sorrows will provide an important zone of overlap to connect work performed on non-event-based trauma with the healing work enabled by models of grieving.

Research on prolonged grief highlights the difficulties involved (Prigerson et al., 2021), but, like psychosomatic research on bereavement’s relationship with illness (O’Connor, 2019), these studies focus on the event of relationship loss and the aftermath of difficulties regaining a sense of self and reality. The harmful consequences of being unable to grieve are also indicated by those who suffer from estranged sorrows, even though they would not qualify as bereaved. Similarly, contemporary models of grief that encourage an oscillation between loss and restoration (Stroebe & Schut, 1999) or imagining continuing bonds that maintain an imaginative connection or relation to the deceased (Klass et al., 1996) indicate the need for a grieving process to include questions of identity and the imagination. Exploring processes around how we grieve the losses we experience, heal through re-imagining connections with the deceased, and come to know ourselves differently is essential. Yet these models for grieving are limited to losses based on specific events—the death of a loved one. For this reason, current research on grieving a known loss of relationship indicates problems associated with being unable to grieve and how the process of grieving involves working with the imagination to create a new sense of identity. Because the focus is on known loss, more work is needed to explore the nature of estranged sorrows and what uses of the imagination would best aid in grieving and healing from an impoverishing past.

The focus on healing from psychological issues tied to damaging events also aptly describes current work in trauma. Much work on trauma is focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that is connected to an event—for example, veterans who return from combat. Whether combat experiences or other related shocking occurrences, trauma treatments and research generally focus on event-based traumas as a way of resolving symptoms such as anxiety, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, negative feelings. As an example, Van der Kolk (2014) remains well known for his work on how traumatic events affect both body and mind. Some recent work on trauma has begun to address non-event-based trauma. For example, by highlighting how what we experience as trauma is indicated more by how events (even “normal” events) impact and influence us, Maté (Maté & Maté, 2022) de-emphasized the nature of an event as the major determinant of trauma, although the effects of trauma remained tied to what can be known or remembered. Trauma studies, like grief studies, primarily emphasizes the consequences of what can be named and known in its harmful, grievous influence over our sense of self and daily well-being. Accounting for the traumatic consequences of what was not received, and experiences of lack, will expand the benefits of post-traumatic growth that currently builds on event-based traumas (Tedeschi et al., 2018).

Estranged sorrows are grievous wounds that negatively affect physical and psychological well-being outside one’s awareness. These occur based on pre-existing conditions in one’s environment that become a baseline of normalcy, such that its influence (the ongoing presence of an emotionally dysregulated environment or the devastating absence of a consistent, loving caregiver) never becomes an event. Problematically, because a loving caregiver was never present in someone’s life, the absence is not characterized as a “loss” even though it does need to be grieved. In order to account for this phenomenon, this essay innovates the term “estranged sorrows” to describe both the “loss” of what was needed but not provided, as well as losses that occur outside one’s conscious awareness or recall. The original work accomplished in this theoretical essay is to identify the presence of estranged sorrows, and provide suggestions for how to help people recover from an otherwise unknowable grief caused by a lack of important early life experiences crucial for developing a sense of self-worth. Appreciating likely difficulties for those raised in such environments offers a way to recognize and ultimately relieve the invisible, unnamable and often unconscious form of unhappiness that develops from such environments. Grieving estranged sorrows opens a renewed emotional capacity that otherwise remains frozen in embodied memories and provides an opportunity to reclaim a sense of self-aware confidence in relating to self and others.

2. Methods

Exploring estranged sorrow requires the resources of depth psychology, which provides an explanation for why profound wounds can be incurred beyond conscious awareness. Depth psychology also offers resources that allow grieving and ultimately recovering from such losses. Psychotherapy, the healing modality informed by depth psychology, originated as a “talking cure” based on an implicit connection between physiological symptoms (fainting, bleeding) and non-remembered early life occurrences. The success of this treatment led to theorizing about the existence of an “unconscious” capable of influencing reactions and responses to events without the consent of consciousness. Conversation provided a new, relational context in which difficult memories and feelings were able to surface.

Much work has been performed on the subject of grief in terms of depth psychology, beginning with “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud, 1973). Several depth psychologists in the Jungian tradition articulate why the resources of depth psychology are uniquely helpful to the grieving process, especially emphasizing the importance of the imagination as part of a healing process of profound grief (Paris, 2015; Mogenson, 1992; Romanyshyn, 1999); however, these scholars align with other work on grief that looks to a form of recovery from a known loss. Although they do not focus on estranged sorrows in their own work, the epistemological framework of depth psychology and the methods they employ do provide a way of exploring unconscious grief. By going beyond the limits of conscious experience, depth psychology’s emphasis on images and the productive imagination, as well as its method of amplification and use of myth, outlines a way to connect with estranged sorrows. Psychotherapeutic practices indicate how the imagination can help to bring unconscious material into conscious relation, how to grieve what has happened in the past, and how to redirect vital resources toward a renewed sense of a fulfilling future.

The additional complications brought by the nameless and unknowable varieties of estranged sorrows make a reliance on these tools and resources of imaginal exploration seem imperative. My approach to estranged sorrows thus works within a framework of depth psychology, as depth psychology originated out of a desire to help translate unspeakable early trauma into a healing story. I apply the epistemology developed in archetypal psychology, which foregrounds the importance of the imagination and myth as a way of exploring psychic reality, moving from the known to the unconscious. My primary methodology builds on the traditional Jungian practice of amplification. This method was initially developed in order to understand how dreams could communicate otherwise unknown material. Amplification takes an image and places it into a different context in which new meanings can be seen and understood.

Depth psychology as a field is distinct in focusing on what is individual and unique. Its research tends to be more essayistic, building on others in the field as a way of supporting new work, rather than creating specific studies. The desired outcome is to provide analysts, therapists, and other helping professionals with important ways to reimagine their approach their work with people. As such, rather than presenting a study and results of the study, the original work of this essay is to assemble research regarding successful depth psychological approaches to grief and identity recovery that seem suited toward opening a way of recognizing and relating to estranged sorrows.

My discussion of the theoretical materials begins with a discussion of the origins of estranged sorrows, exploring how they develop in early experiences and connecting it to descriptions of implicit trauma widely discussed in the literature. Following this, I suggest the importance of narrative amplification to describe the importance of the productive imagination as part of memory useful for the healing work of identity recovery by forming coherent life stories. I then turn to imaginal amplification as an important method for grieving estranged sorrows: I explore how figures and identities can be created as an inner object whose loss can be grieved. Next, I look to a case study from the literature as a way of outlining how mythic amplification provides a broader context that offers a sense of belonging and community important for healing from the isolation of pain. After a brief discussion, I then conclude with the limitations of this essay and suggestions for future research.

3. Trauma: The Origin of Estranged Sorrows

Our tendency to cling to conscious experiences as though they were representative samples of the whole of our lives is understandable yet inaccurate. On reflection, it is possible to appreciate not only the unavailability of many (if not most) childhood experiences but also the ways in which our daily cares and ordinary concerns prevent us from being conscious of the full spectrum of reality that surrounds our breathing bodies. Memories capable of recollection are a small slice of lived experiences and often offer an unconsciously cultivated collection: our beliefs about what will matter in the future are strangely inaccurate. Thus, a stray scent brings a flood of heretofore forgotten experiences into the present and a photograph from a celebration marking a momentous milestone, months later, requires a caption to recover any information about what occurred.

For this reason, psychologists tend to group memories into two categories. Implicit memories (including procedural memories, including both instinctual body processes and emotional memories) are largely unconscious and outside the purview of explicit memories, gathered through intentional, verbal recollections. Explicit memories are those capable of conscious retrieval—the things we know that we know and can recover as visual or verbal images. Many event-based trauma studies, including much research on PTSD, emphasizes traumatic occurrences that involve persistent and often unwelcome explicit memories. Part of what makes estranged sorrow difficult to locate, name, and grieve is that it is not associated with explicit memories or specific events. Early trauma is stored in the body rather than storied in the memory (Dunlea, 2019). An overwhelmingly negative emotional experience that an infant endures becomes encoded in as part of the implicit memory system, alongside other kinds of innate, instinctive responses. It is for this reason that profound consequences can emerge when infants experience emotional neglect: it literally becomes woven into the framework of the body that supports them through the rest of their lives. This embodied mode of carrying the consequences of injury that precedes conscious and linguistic awareness is one primary origin of estranged sorrow.

Implicit injuries can emerge from a normal failure of emotional support through misattuned reactions from caregivers. Such moments can devastate infants, who instinctually look to their caregivers for a sense of worth, safety, and belonging. These early innate impulses that instinctually instruct us to seek emotional care are part of what Jungians consider the core archetypal psychological patterns that induce important developmental stages within life. Because we were born with them as a form of psychological instinct, these archetypal impulses are, like physiological processes, a form of implicit memory. Speaking from a Jungian psychological framework, Weller (2015) described that throughout our lifetime, we “are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection”, and that “the absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog”: such absences both cause the need to grieve and make it impossible to do so (p. 54) Put otherwise, unmet innate necessities create an amorphous feeling of deprivation. When innate needs go unsatisfied, the absence of such experiences are grievous but difficult to express. Instead of being discharged through an act of conscious mourning, the background of sorrow is stored as a body memory.

Another way to think about estranged sorrows originating from implicit injury precedes one’s particular, personal life. Wolynn (2016) offered a way of thinking through how a version of ancestral grief occurs as problematic relationship dynamics in the family unit that predate one’s birth. Weller (2015) described this as ancestral grief, which affects future generations as a “diminished inheritance” (p. 63). The presence of ancestral trauma replaces more hopeful psychological resources as what is passed along to subsequent generations. This aligns with epigenetic research that shows how deep family history can affect genetic function. The presence of ancestral grief refers to how a learned and embodied psychological inheritance narrows a quality of expectations and presuppositions that pre-exist and inform individual life. As a powerful form of cultural inheritance, ancestral grief—often pertaining to past traumatic experiences never put into words—remains something implicitly present for those removed in time and space from an event.

Drawing on Siegel and Jung, Dunlea (2019) connected repeated responses to an implicit stimulus as the foundation of beliefs (p. 47). Advancing on her insight, I argue that a belief is a retrospective verbal explanation for habitual behavior that is created due to repeated embodied reactions to environmental influences. A belief substitutes for an explicit memory of an event: it articulates that something is generally or universally true to justify or otherwise attempt to make sense of certain behaviors. As an example, infants who were scolded for seeking comfort when scared may become insensitive to inner fear feelings and become adults who (wrongly) believe that they do not get scared; alternatively, they may have difficulty sharing their experiences of fear with others, believing (on reflection) that nobody would understand or accept their fear as valid. Although it is available as an explicit explanation, beliefs are often left unarticulated—they instead become enacted as behaviors and eventually as habits that conform and thus confirm the original unstated belief. In this way, the implicit belief becomes an invisible determinant of reality: when the body responds consistently to an environment in ways that create predictable results, it provides a powerful experience that an unspoken belief is true. As explicit memories are built on the framework of these beliefs, they reinforce the viability of these beliefs and provide a way of understanding the meaning of a memory or an event. Identities forged on the basis of these beliefs and stories that process the memories into a relatively coherent narrative are deeply informed by the unavailability of needed experiences.

A background of unknowable hurt has harmful consequences beyond both the moment and what is carried forward in life. Experiences of lack and the persistence of grief provide an emerging consciousness with its foundation for beliefs about the future. Such beliefs are consistent with despair: when our most primal needs went unmet beyond our knowing, we no longer can greet any conscious hope with a positive expectation. This results in a set of expectations that implicitly limit the realm of possibilities to what seems small and safe, screening out opportunities that would require positive associations with hope. Identities constructed on this basis of barren deprivation thus orient toward shallow and superficial goals. Even when these are attained, they do not contribute to a sense of accomplishment, meaning, or worth. The lack of this kind of deep, necessary satisfaction becomes a nameless, unmet yearning that serves as its own source of estranged sorrows.

Over time, distracted parenting opens the potential that an implicit belief postulating that core needs will never be met will become an innate, unnamable sense of lack, loss, or sorrow. Amias (2024) posited that one example of a tension that gives rise to such beliefs emerges from the seemingly unresolvable conflict between two basic needs—authenticity and belonging—shared by all humans. We retain an inner mandate to discover and reveal our authentic selves through an inquisitive and encouraging self-relationship; at the same time, we also have a need for belonging through participation in community with others. These core needs constitute the basis of our physical and psychological welfare—our ability to survive difficulties and thrive through challenge. When our early interactions are shaped by neglect or a lack of a caring, attentive presence, it often causes people to react by sacrificing authenticity in order to secure a sense of belonging. These implicit ways of relating to others, carried in the body, then form beliefs about relationships—beliefs often predicated on a sense of being unworthy of mutual regard or even basic respect. The pain associated with not having received a caring presence or loving touch during times of panic or duress in infancy remains unknowable and incommunicable. Future grievous choices based on beliefs inspired by this kind of absence trauma result in adult relationships that feel familiarly unfulfilling. Numbed into a normalized sense of acceptance, the depths of true grief remain undiscovered: estranged sorrows accumulate. Our sense of self is shaped by a resignation that might include feeling like the authentic self is unlovable, that a feeling of genuine belonging is unreachable, or oscillating between both.

For example, when infants experience consistent misattunement from caregivers, the feelings of deep sorrow at a preconceptual and preverbal level may well lead to the creation of a protective belief that makes sense of these experiences. Amias (2024) described beliefs such as “my needs don’t matter”, “I don’t have value”, or “it’s not safe to trust others” as core wounds. These beliefs function to prevent awareness of the intense emotions stored as body memories by eliminating the potential of a situation in which a sense of dependence would risk awakening the stored memories. The tragic circumstances that conditioned the body memories, including the intense emotions, are retained as implicit memories and carried through life while remaining unavailable as explicit memories. When a caregiver consistently fails to respond in ways that reaffirm an infant’s sense of innate worthiness, or when a child is repeatedly berated for normal, genuine emotional responses, these experiences become encoded as a sense of shame.

The sense of shameful fragments that become disavowed as part of the self, as one particular form of estranged sorrow, can create what Schwartz (Schwartz & Morissette, 2021) described as “exiles” in his model of Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS therapy works to re-integrate exiles into a whole sense of self, often using forms of imaginative personification. Unlike estranged sorrows, many exiles can be identified around events—more cities on a map than the nameless spaces between. Weller (2015) argued that we only grieve for what we value, and the creation of a shameful fragment, like an exile, prevents grief because “we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief” (p. 31). In other words, the inability to feel the innate value of an aspect of ourselves interrupts our ability to mourn for what it experiences. In this way, shame serves as a source of estranged sorrow.

As a further complication, the alienation and repudiation of inner attributes becomes a foundational part of a developing identity. The child’s emerging sense of self is bifurcated: a conscious awareness clings to a sense of self as consistent with what are perceived to be desirable qualities, and the other components—shrouded in shame and unknown grief—become forgotten but ongoing influences. A sense of these alienated aspects of self not only remains carried on as part of the implicit memory system, but the whole structure of the developing personality and sense of self is constructed, in part, as an intended contrast to what was unconsciously deemed unlovable. The sense of identity thus weaves its undesired and unseen other—and the anguish attached to it—into an unthinkable but omnipresent shadow. Over time, grief is denied to memory and the unrecognized, disavowed inner potential becomes buried under a sea of sorrow. The burial of unrecognized potential becomes a devastating, silent loss that becomes embodied as an ongoing diminished sense of self whose source and presence gradually enter into the realm of the unknown. What Amias (2024) called absence trauma, which occurs when implicit expectations of emotional support go unmet, Weller (2015) describes as slow trauma, indicating what results when the available care is “too thin and [doesn’t] provide us with enough substance to calm the effect of the experience we were having” (p. 38). When we repeatedly fail to obtain the comfort we instinctively expect from caregivers and form impoverishing beliefs as a substitute, estranged sorrow results.

A second way of understanding the origin of estranged sorrows builds on another way that experiences remain hidden from conscious awareness and an ability to be placed into language. Describing the traumatic consequences of parenting practices influenced by patriarchal norms, Gilligan and Snider (2018) argued that this influence causes caregivers to raise children who implicitly divide knowing and caring along gender-specific lines, and thus “render both men and women less than fully human” (p. 41). Put otherwise, the enforcement of gender norms divides two basic modes of consciousness—knowing and feeling—in terms of a gender binary. Disconnecting knowing from feeling impoverishes a sense of emotional literacy as well as basic self-awareness. If we cannot know what we feel and are rendered unable to convert feelings into actionable or practical knowledge, the resulting lack of awareness of inner states makes it more likely that any feeling of estranged sorrow will remain unavailable to consciousness. Any anguish related to this culturally inflicted severing of the self, or the inability to integrate vital components of self-awareness into a unified identity, will remain similarly unidentifiable. The traumatic process of disintegration and the anguish at the resulting sense of incompletion remains an ongoing, haunting factor influencing our choices and actions.

A third way of thinking about the origin of estranged sorrows is supported by Scarry (1985), who wrote about the relationship of pain, language, and the imagination. Her focus is on physical pain, which is a unique mode of consciousness because it lacks a particular object and thus “resists objectification in language” (p. 5). Put otherwise, because pain refers to an inner experience that has no external (shared) point of reference, it becomes difficult to put into words that others can understand. The experience of intense embodied suffering eliminates an ability to access verbal awareness. The inability to convert pain or anguish into language means that “pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed” (p. 4), a gap caused because denial and confirmation both rely on verbal representations of experienced reality. Although Scarry specifically excluded psychological suffering from her study based on an assertion that it “is susceptible to verbal objectification” (p. 11), it would seem that early experiences of unrecognized anguish that become encoded as body memories sufficiently erase any specific sense of knowable reference just as preverbal experiences of pain would lack any ability to truly be adequately described. Because early suffering often precedes the learned division of the physical from psychological, because the influential anguish often precedes learning language, and because experiences of pain remain resistant to being given words, any early sorrows would become estranged from an ongoing sense of self or reality. Nonetheless, although they remain inaccessible, such estranged sorrows would nonetheless continue to silently influence actions and inform interpretations throughout a lifetime.

4. Healing: The Potential of the Productive Imagination

Because they are part of the implicit memory system and unavailable to consciousness, working to integrate estranged sorrows, recover a full sense of identity, and heal from a sense of shame requires approaches unlike those used for recovering from event-based trauma. Healing requires the use of the imagination, which means drawing from methods most frequently used in depth psychology—particularly the method of amplification. In general, amplification takes an image and places it into a larger or different context that allows it to become recognizable and meaningful.

This section offers some of the theoretical grounding beneath what I call narrative amplification, which uses the productive imagination in the form of storytelling to create a context in which the inchoate and inarticulable feelings of past anguish can be imaginatively remembered. Musing on one’s past in ways that fictionalize what could be true and telling stories that allow embodied grief to take verbal form are two ways that the productive imagination can create an externalized sense of self that can be reflected upon compassionately. Narrative amplification as a mode of narrative therapy provides a way of bringing estranged sorrows into relation with the reality of one’s own present life, a meaningful work that then unfolds into a potential grievability (Madigan, 2019).

Estranged sorrows that flow from ancestral trauma, implicit memories, or socially imposed gender identifications have two things in common. First, estranged sorrows resist being put into words and fall outside a sense of chronologically ordered biographical memory. Identities that are built throughout adolescence and adulthood presuppose these sorrows and are often constructed to prevent them from coming to awareness. Second, estranged sorrows involve a fracturing or splitting of the personality—especially if one’s innate identity is associated with shame. Focus falls on the familiar, surface social identity as opposed to the latent, unconscious identity: Jungians use the terms “persona” and “shadow” to refer to these psychological domains. The persona builds on a recognition of what traits and aspects others find desirable and often involves an idealized sense of the self, while the shadow holds all aspects of the personality that are associated with shame, guilt, or what is deemed problematic (Stein, 1998). Over time, the inner dissonance becomes increasingly unbearable even as the reality of estranged sorrows remains impossible to articulate. Because estranged sorrows only express themselves indirectly and because they lay outside of memory, the imagination provides an important avenue to access them.

The relationship connecting pain and the imagination was most persuasively developed by Scarry (1985). Scarry theorized that the fact that pain lacked a referential object may have given birth to our imaginative capacity, and thus is an important complement to what is painful and unrepresentable. She argued that pain and the imagination have an inverse relationship, such that pain is unique in existing without objects while the imagination is identical to its objects (p. 162). Further, pain requires the mediation of the imagination in order to become an intentional state able to be discussed or described (p. 164). In other words, whether or not the imaginative capacity to create objects for consciousness is related to the alienating experience of pain’s objectlessness, the imagination seems uniquely able to provide a way for pain to come into intentional consciousness because it produces referential objects able to be described and discussed in language. Moving beyond the experience of physical pain, Scarry argued that the imagination provides a backup for generating the objects that the world fails to provide (p. 166). Developing Scarry’s insight further, the imagination can be seen as offering a compensatory way of creating a form around which conscious thought can be anchored. It thus provides a way for estranged sorrows to become known.

Scarry’s emphasis on language invokes a different form of imagination than what is generally conceived—the kind of reproductive imagination often associated with visualized images. Ricoeur (2024) contrasts the imaginative effort to reproduce an original perception with the productive imagination associated with works of narrative fiction, which (like estranged sorrows) lack any kind of origin. The reproductive imagination relies on past experiences which it attempts to reproduce. The productive imagination is different: it relies on spontaneous creativity rather than relying on an external input, offering an expanded sense of possibilities for being in the world as well as providing fresh ways of relating to things in the world. This suggests that the productive imagination provides avenues toward orientations that are otherwise unthinkable. At its most basic level, the productive imagination works on the basis of an innate linguistic capacity. While the reproductive imagination builds from sense memories and perceptual experiences, the productive imagination is based on word images that are distinct from sense memory. Distinguishing “perceptual pictures” from “imagined images”, Hillman (1983) argued that words relate us back to an innate, imaginal, creative, productive imagination. His work maintained that the imaginal realm is distinct from the one opened from and occupied through our perceptual experiences. Hillman’s contrast of imaginal and perceptual also indicates that the former possesses the strengths of language as always available in the moment, thus unlike fleeting perceptual images whose recollection remains anchored in specific, contingent contexts.

Thus, even as we often use language to attempt to recreate past perceptions and experiences, words themselves possess an importantly ability to invite us to occupy the imaginal, which exists at a different, deeper level of reality. Ricoeur (2024) builds on Aristotle’s Poetics to argue that poetry—as a creative process—comprises a way to inquire into the depths of what is, investigating the essence of existence (p. 220). Put otherwise, if the reproductive imagination is mimetic by imitating contingent reality through perceptual images (as history), the mimetic action of the productive imagination (as poetry) gestures toward an eternal reality, or ongoing, fundamental verities of human life. For Ricoeur, the productive reference of a fictional story or poetic insight—which exists beyond a contingent reality—provides access to the essence of tragic human actions. In this way, language provides a way for people to engage with eternal truths. Applying Ricoeur’s insight shows how language opens access to what Hillman calls the imaginal.

Understanding this important distinction between the reproductive and productive modes of the imagination is essential for appreciating how narratives can shift a sense of personal identity. Hillman (1983), with reference to Freud’s creation of case histories, wrote that blending language and imagination is at the heart of psychotherapy: “Any case history of the mind will have to be…an imaginative making, a poetic fiction” (p. 6). Note how Hillman, like Ricoeur, emphasized how this imaginative process begins with words. Hillman further advised that therapeutic fictions emerge through an emphasis on plot (looking to inner causality), rather than story (which emphasizes what happens next): thus, “Only when a narrative receives inner coherence in terms of the depths of human nature do we have fiction, and for this fiction we have to have plot” (p. 12). Hillman’s insight implies that, from a storytelling perspective, a healing plot emphasizes what is going on now rather than on what may happen next: the focus is on an inner coherence found through retrospection and reflection. To develop this further, building a sense of identity on this kind of inner coherence through an awareness of plot allows a crafting of a fiction that can move forward with an empowering emphasis on direction and intention. While a reproductive imagination may focus on worries about potential events that might happen (at the level Hillman would identify as “story”), the productive imagination provides a deeper grasp of characteristics that open new potential options for the future.

The narrative potential that unfolds from the productive imagination seeks to confirm a characteristic component of identity that was dormant when attention was focused on events within a history. Thus, rather than attempting to validate or confirm a sense of self by looking to the mirror of past events, Hillman (1983) pointed toward a way to rewrite memory based on a different set of presuppositions, creating a case history in a philosophic sense. Doing so requires adhering to a standard of truth more akin to metaphor or hypotheticals than something with a literal, reductionist sense of true and false (p. 16). The new presupposition implies something like Ricoeur’s productive referent, which remains beyond the mimetic constraints of a reproductive memory or a history to become something whose truth touches the essence. Hillman signaled this suspension of factual or contingent recollection (that would focus on reiterating past understandings of earlier events) through the language of depth, which refers to what remains external from a chronological or biographical history (p. 33). This indicates an important distinction between what truth means at the level of a superficial series of events and what truth means at the level of an inner core.

Navigating between these two understandings of a truth set at a distance from the present requires acquiring an expanded sense of what memory might mean. Hillman (1983) accomplishes this by using the relation of history and depth to build a bridge connecting memory and imagination, with recourse to a Neoplatonic sense of memoria. He wrote, “remembering what never happened must rightly be called imagining, and this sort of memory is imagination. Memoria was the old term for both. It referred to an activity and a place that today we call variously memory, imagination, and the unconscious” (p. 47). This suggests that memoria is the quality of imagination that accesses the depths of the unconscious to imaginatively construct a coherent, alternative awareness or understanding of the past. Developing Hillman’s idea that the memory involves imagination, it seems that anchoring forms of creative recollection through the productive imagination allows a way to access the unconscious, which would include an awareness of absence trauma—the anticipated experiences that never occurred in history. Because this approach moves into the depths, it provides a way to consciously explore other implicit truths than what became historically unfolded through a set of traumatically imposed beliefs. This quality of the imagination provides the “missing objects” that Scarry identified as part of what produces a sense of alienating pain. Even though these never were encoded as explicit memories—at the level of history—such objects emerge to provide a potential for new understandings of one’s past and one’s self.

Often, a traumatically imposed belief involves a level of incoherence at the level of self that tears between a deep sense of self that knows it is deserving of love and a historical self that never encountered love and which shaped lived experience into beliefs. Many beliefs that involve the negative consequences of traumatic events (things that happened) or the negative consequence of absence trauma (things that did not happen) into a protective schema incorporate a deep level of shame. This shame shapes a self-image around beliefs that the self is unworthy or is unable to find love. Such beliefs are often consistent with a story about the self, making sense of events that unfold in conscious awareness as a child matures into adulthood—but this level of coherence is at the level of story, a narrative that was generated on the basis of the pre-existing beliefs. This story explicates the relationship of behaviors and beliefs in the form of a sense of self-identity. Importantly, this story and the associated beliefs are often maintained through an ongoing work of repetition. Ensuring that this story and these beliefs retain their guiding framework means rehearsing wounding beliefs, such as “I don’t matter”, “I’m not important”, or “I will never be loved” as part of an inner monologue, while enacting behaviors that seem to validate these beliefs as “true”. Repeating these beliefs consciously keeps them at the foreground, shifting attention away from dormant potential beliefs that might remain implicit in the untraversed depths of the self. The compulsion to repeat such beliefs consciously is intended as a protective or cautionary measure that maintains a barrier from the estranged sorrows that were traumatically overwhelming to a developing soul.

The importance of Hillman’s reference to depth is that it invokes something that has remained preserved and unperceived outside of history, specifically the personal history of remembered events that occurred on the basis of the presupposed beliefs. Imaginal potential provides a crucial supplement to perceptual recollections. This self, which knows itself to be loved and worthy of love, was never able to be recognized by caregivers in emotionally neglectful or impoverished environments. This self maintains the implicit archetypal structure of expectations that are eternally true—even if they were never verified by contingent, unfolding events. Part of the work of healing from early trauma and grieving estranged sorrows builds on the foundation of this loveable self that had been disavowed or forgotten to support a new identity. This loveable self, at the depths of existence, provides a foundation for a coherent identity that brings a sense of compassionate understanding to earlier trauma-imposed beliefs about worthiness and identity. A coherent story about the self must ultimately rest upon the existent sense of the self as loveable, innocent, and good—the deep awareness of the self that precedes a history of trauma. Once an appreciation for innate goodness becomes the foundation for a coherent identity, it becomes a core plot that can support a new, self-authored fiction about the self as an imaginative, originary creation.

This narrative approach to reconstructing identity through revisiting and healing past moments that lay beyond conscious recollection is consistent with the work of psychotherapy. Hillman (1983) wrote that “Psychotherapy first set out to heal memory”, articulating a threefold Freudian process: distinguishing memory and history, recognizing rememberances as images, and allowing the free-floating activity of “musing” to transform memories into images (p. 49). Restating Hillman’s steps in terms of what was discussed above, the first step identifies conceptual beliefs and treats them as hypothetical or metaphorical, which then unfreezes the actual image of a past experience to become open to other “as-if” potentials. The work of memory then becomes one of musing over images from a perspective open to a new form of potential coherence within the self. Building on Hillman, the therapeutic process of narrative amplification begins by expanding the work of memory to include the imagination, then removes specific beliefs from a memory to liberate what was remembered from a single or fixed interpreted meaning, and finally allows the resulting image to come to new life by musing on it once more without the preconceptions that had stuck to it.

Moving beyond Hillman, it would seem that this work of musing would also potentially involve examining beliefs that cover over estranged sorrows. An estranged sorrow, especially one based on implicit or procedural memories that developed around the absence of an attuned caretaker, would become recognizable as a belief that lacks a specific event-based image or concrete memory. The process of inviting memory to heal into the imagination allows a rehabilitation of the memory based on a deep, core, coherent sense of the self as inviolable and loveable. New opportunities to bear witness to the unnoticed or unrecognized loveable core of the self unfold through the imaginative memory process—this may involve the construction of new, imagined images that can replace the former trauma-imposed beliefs. These images, imagined memories, provide a new basis for musing around and reshaping a fresh foundation for an empowering self-identity. Images, which are multidimensional and fluid, tend to be more powerful than a rigid, limiting, merely conceptual belief—even when this belief also carries potent emotional charge. Introducing fresh memories in terms of images of a loveable self will often allow the former trauma-imposed beliefs (constructed based on inadequate information, resources, or awareness) to fall away, as does a scab when new skin has healed under an injured surface. This healed context for understanding images also provides new interpretations of past images that are no longer fixed by old beliefs, allowing formerly estranged sorrows to flow into the reforming concept of the self.

One way to appreciate the difference between fresh memories of a loveable self that flow freely from a productive imagination and the reproduced memories of an unlovable self that are repeated in relation to trauma-imposed beliefs is to visualize the two sources of imagination as occupying different parts of the body. It seems useful to allow the reproductive imagination to be housed in the brain, where sensations and perceptions are processed in conjunction with learned beliefs. On the other hand, the traditional source of what Ricoeur calls the productive imagination, where a more true plot originates, is in the heart. Blending the research of Sufi scholar Henri Corbin with Jungian insights, Hillman (1992) stated clearly that, “the thought of the heart is the thought of images, that the heart is the seat of imagination, that imagination is the authentic voice of the heart, so that if we speak from the heart we must speak imaginatively” (p. 9). In other words, imagistic thinking is not only different from conceptual thinking but traditionally arises from the heart—rather than the brain. Imagining the thought of the heart opens access of what Asian cultures regard as the heart-mind (Hirshfield, 1997, p. 82): thinking from the heart based on the productive imagination thus also serves to close the gendered rift between thinking and feeling produced in Western cultures. This rekindled heart-based imaginal thinking provides a foundation for what Judd (2023) calls affective sedulity, “the impulse, desire, and rigorous relationship toward felt knowledge” with a “particular focus on felt knowledge resituates the very concept of knowledge and thus its transmissions, transmutations, and forms of habit”, creating an alternative to merely rational or conceptual knowledge (p. 11). Judd’s pairing of the affective, feeling level of experience with sedulity, which refers to qualities of attentiveness and diligence, reorients how knowledge is made. It refers to a way of thinking in which meaning is created and opens potential for exploring the imaginal realm, as the heart-mind requires an ongoing attentiveness toward feeling.

Even as stories conspire with a desire to know what happens next in ways that focus attention on outer consequences rather than the internal necessity of plot, they also awaken the capacity to imagine. Hillman (1983) argued that the prominence of storytelling in our society provides innate knowledge about the imaginal, because being lost in a story—however fantastic—feels meaningful and real. Storytelling also cements the relationship connecting word and world in our experience (p. 53). Stories awaken our childhood capacity to move fluidly into and out from imaginal worlds built on the words we see and hear. The connection of sharing stories and childlike imagining is at the heart of how therapy works. For Hillman, therapy entails an imaginative exercise based on exchanging stories, a habit formed in a pre-literate childhood, which remains the common ground of imagination (p. 54).

The method of narrative amplification thus uses the sense that story, childhood and imagination are connected. This method connects to a sense of the deep, essential, worthy self that remains protected from contingent, biographical events. This foundation allows for a healing work of undoing learned stories based on trauma-imposed beliefs and uncovering a whole and unseen conception of the self that can imagine fresh memories, create new stories, and support an alternative identity. The emphasis on the imagination as part of memory also enables people to create images connected to estranged sorrows, and thus give form and voice to long submerged pain. The framework of narrative can thus provide a context in which the deep, essential sense of self can be braided alongside estranged sorrows and the contingent biography of the self. Importantly, this new identity will have been forged in relation to past sorrows, which, having been imagined, no longer are estranged.

5. Grieving: The Process of Imaginal Identification and Interment

This section employs an imaginal amplification, looking to convert latent grief and estranged sorrows into definable images. This takes the work of the productive imagination, described above, into a different direction. Rather than a narrative context, the imaginal context provides an affective way of connecting emotionally with the images of one’s past and present identity. Connected with a grieving process, imaginal amplification allows a ritual method for identity recovery through the memorial process of recollection (of past feelings), recomposition (into an image), and interment (buried as different from one’s present and future self-direction). The process of grieving allows a work of identity recovery, which allows the creation of a sense of self not affected by estranged sorrows based on a new perspective of one’s past.

Predating the research on grieving listed at the beginning of this article, the most pivotal or foundational study on grief, and certainly one of the best known was published by Kübler-Ross (1973), emerged from a 1969 publication focused on dying. The well-known five stage model (never designed to presuppose a linear movement) includes denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The application to grieving occurred afterward. Subsequent criticism and alternative models retain a focus on grief that follows after a shocking event, but less is performed on how the grieving process truly follows the arc of dying. In reality, grieving is always a two-part process: the known grief focused on the absence of one who was beloved, and what often is an unconscious grief of a lost identity that was anchored in the relationship with the beloved. This section explores the importance of associating the process of grieving estranged sorrows with an imaginal relation to death and dying, creating an imaginal narrative that creates both a figure of loss and an image of self in relation to what was lost. These imaginal constructs provide a dissipative structure that can absorb the intense, disruptive force of grief in ways that use disequilibrium to open new potential avenues for growth (Wheatley, 1999, p. 17). Like a cocoon, a dissipative structure is useful to the extent to which it can be temporary.

One resonant reality arising from Kübler-Ross’s work (and maintained in many contemporary studies) acknowledges grief as a process that has a beginning and ending point, a process that changes over time. The truth of grief’s liminal life and the temporary truths that arise to be felt before vanishing underlies the wrongful literalization of its stages as literal steps. Judd (2023) captured this quality by emphasizing the affective, non-cognitive aspects of grief as the “very visceral state of both being in between and being aware of being in between states of life and death” (p. 33). Anchored in embodied experiences, Judd’s grief is a fourfold process: an experience of liminality, an awareness of this precarious (liminal) position, a recollection of the loss that initiated the process, and an identification with the position of being lost. At an affective level, Judd foregrounds the disorienting confusion that attends grief, the suddenly indistinct sense of self, and the juxtaposition of being both alive and dead. Judd distinguishes grief and anger—the latter relates more to grievance, which can range from protest to rage, and which—unlike grief—remains attached to a specific outcome (p. 61). Outcomes, plans, and timelines are foreign to grief, which is anchored in its remembrance of loss. Thus, the work of recovery is not geared toward restoration, but only “uncovers what stays lost”, such that “what is lost stays lost but the open chasm of something was here remains as memory” as grief continues to remember what now is gone (p. 59). This disclosed abyss is the kind of opened image that invites Hillman’s process of musing. Musing into this abyss allows loss to become an experience beyond time that cuts to the depths: grief adds images to the experience in ways that allow it to become finite. Thus, unlike the fact of loss, in grief, the lost becomes a present absence that creates a breach or rift accessed through memory. Estranged sorrow points to a difficulty of grieving an unknowable loss that has no direct access to memory—but thrusts one into the liminal state of being lost between life and death nonetheless. The original loss must be remembered before the process of grief can begin. Imaginal amplification allows this to occur.

If an often-overlooked triumph of infancy occurs in setting aside overwhelming experiences of loss and terror in order to make space to learn survival, then an often-neglected task of adulthood lies in exhuming the estranged sorrows that remain unknown and unprocessed, bringing them to consciousness, and then engaging in a matured form of forgetfulness. Hyde (2019) described two kinds of metaphorical burials that allow forgetfulness, one which is temporarily hidden as an alternative to being overwhelmed, and the other which is buried with a sense of finality, after it has been exhumed, experienced, and processed (p. 39). Ungrieved sorrows are hidden away by a protective psychic function, a kind of guardian angel that removes from awareness what would prevent future potential from emerging. In time, these buried fragments begin impinging on conscious awareness through symptomatic repeated behavioral compulsions that occur as a “kind of stuttering toward speech, toward the symbolization that can be held in mind and therefore worked upon until forgotten” (p. 122). The move from symptom to symbol requires a work of bringing the sorrow to conscious awareness, being present to it, such that this work of memory allows a second burial. “Once a trauma has been properly buried, you can call it to mind, but you do not have to. It’s available but not intrusive, not haunting” (p. 141). A proper burial, generated through a process of conscious awareness, acceptance, and absolution, allows past trauma to move from the unthought level of the body and trauma-imposed beliefs into the new domain, where the past is removed from the present in a way that restores access to unanticipated futures.

It is possible to imagine that Hyde’s movement from symptom to symbol involves a memorial work of recollection, recomposition, and interment. This memorial work is an essential part of identity formation in adulthood. The creative power that allows infants to instinctively remove injurious experiences from conscious awareness to implicit memory is immense and worthy of respect. The process that forms estranged sorrows emerges through an importantly incomplete attempt at forgetting, which precludes the total extinction of the nascent personality. This results in the construction of a sense of self contextualized by consistency, by what seems safe—or at the very least, familiar. As a survival technique, this initial work of forgetting allows infants to continue to learn, develop, and grow. An identity—the persona—forms based on external necessity: it is often focused on meeting the demands and desires of others important for the child’s survival. The work of identity recovery often erupts in midlife as a response to an unexpected by pressing inner necessity, often expressed in the syntax and vocabulary of compulsive behaviors Hyde described that point to a hitherto unknown loss that needs to be recovered and grieved to allow for a different kind of growth. In infancy, estranged sorrows emerge from the loss of an experience, rather than an object. A greater emotional capacity in adulthood allows for more to be recollected using the form of imaginal memory described by Hillman, in which current capacities gather unknowable wounds in ways relevant to the present. The totality of what is gathered is then recomposed into an imaginal figure that represents the totality of past positive ideals and negative identifications (including estranged sorrows and shadow materials) that no longer retain relevance or meaning for the future.

For Stein (1983), midlife itself and its transition into adulthood occasions experiences of liminality and a potent, indefinable sense of loss that opens into an extensive mode of grieving. Because the sense of loss exceeds any specific event, Stein’s description of grief seems important for depicting a way of relating to and recovering from estranged sorrows, including the amorphous sense of losing what was never known. The liminality that Stein described is similar to what Judd offered, as above. Liminality is caused by the inability to identify with a former self-image (p.11). In his words, “identity is hung in suspension …the fixed edges of memory blur and fade, and the past juts forward in surprising and peculiar ways; the future has no particular image or contour. The ‘I’ is not anchored to any particular inner images, ideas, or feelings” (pp. 8–9). In other words, a sense of self is generally contained by a sense of temporal awareness—familiarity with an acknowledged history and desired goals—as well as a specific internal picture of one’s self, world, and relationships. This inner picture, in the first half of life, is often constructed in relation to the persona. When entering liminality, the sense of self is displaced from habitual or containing relationships that would enable the reproductive imagination to continue repeating the familiar histories and dreams that provide narrative continuity through constraining definitions of the self. For those whose lives were shaped by estranged sorrows, being suddenly shifted beyond the familiar contextual and conceptual matrix that supported the learned identity in childhood provides a new, intimate access to raw, unprocessed grief. Entering into this space of liminality is necessary to allow a healing of past trauma and a reconstitution of the self, a process which emerges as “basic psychological structures undergo dissolution, and archetypal patterns of self-organization becomes so deeply modified or reformed as to constitute a definite transformation of the personality” (p. 13). The persona, at the least, becomes recognizable as a dissipative structure that crumbles when it can no longer adapt—but whose decay enables the realization of recovered potential on a more firm foundation than one comprising and compromised by estranged sorrows.

It is perhaps particularly difficult for those who carry estranged sorrows and who struggle to construct a sense of identity that would enable survival to accept that this created self, which has shifted and adapted over decades, is also a cocoon—a temporary structure that kept safe a more capacious existence until it was time to emerge. Dąbrowski (2016) described this potential in his theory of positive disintegration, in which symptoms generally regarded as negative or problematic, such as the “complete fragmentation of the personality structure”, loosens the grip of familiar forms and thus opens the way to something new, the “development of a higher psychic structure” (p. 4). The work of loosening and splintering the inner psychic terrain arises through an increase in inner tension and external pressures. The effect of this is to provide a sense of distance from what had been familiar, allowing it to be reclaimed from a different—higher—vantage point. The process moves from a level of primary integration, largely identified by desires for immediate gratification of impulses and characterized by conflicts with the surrounding environment, to the potential for integrating at a higher level (p. 3). The weakening of this primary integration (which would be accomplished through the experience of liminality Stein described above) allows the development of a new inner relation comprising tension between an emergent personality ideal and a nascent ability to discriminate superior and inferior feelings and impulses (pp. 30–34). The resulting affective experience of two selves opens a process of self-education: a person becomes both student and instructor. This is an active and healing form of self-relationship that forges a new sense of confidence in one’s own ability to be present during distress even if such experiences were lacking in early life. Dąbrowski’s depiction of self-education displays an expansion of inner space between the inferior and superior, the educated and what educates, all of which become recognizable as true aspects of the self. An ability to relate to and identify with a superior inner aspect of the self makes space for inner feelings of unworthiness, shame, and guilt—consistent with estranged sorrows from childhood—to be acknowledged without it producing overwhelming sensations of being flooded. Once estranged sorrows are brought into the threshold of tolerance and awareness, the emotional content can be thawed and repurposed, as “dissolution can involve those lower, more primitive forms of memory, emotions, and impulses which are not included in the immediate level of the patient’s aims” (p. 68). The process of positive disintegration and achievement of a matured self requires this dissolution because the higher psychological structure requires the availability generated by loosening up the more rigid and less sophisticated structures created earlier in one’s life (p. 94).

From a Jungian perspective such as that expressed by Stein (1983), midlife offers an important period when Dąbrowski’s process of positive disintegration may unfold in a marked way. Stein characterized this as a shift from an externally oriented public persona to an authentic, inward orientation—allowing a unique blending of what seems inner and outer realities (p. 27). In other words, releasing learned influences—including estranged sorrows—enables a higher degree of individual discernment capable of choosing desired influences. The analog of Dąbrowski’s primary integration in Stein’s work is the persona, the constructed, early identity that must be released in the initial work of a midlife transition. Like Hyde, Stein used the metaphor of a corpse in need of burial to describe the process of unearthing and burying past, unprocessed and unhealed emotional content. In Stein’s terms, a deeper discovery of the self requires that a person “‘find the corpse’ and then to bury it: to identify the source of the pain and put the past to rest by grieving, mourning, and burying it” (pp. 27–28). This in-depth process requires the participation of both conscious and unconscious aspects of the personality to ensure that the old identities (which harbored estranged sorrows) are truly buried, rather than merely hidden (p. 38–39). The burial of the former identity also requires unearthing, mourning, and burying earlier and less mature self-images, goals, and ideals based in a primary integration (pp. 40–41).

Here again, the process of affective sedulity, or using a mode of felt knowledge that integrates the heart-mind in the process of grief, becomes important. In tandem with the increased capacity to hold emotional tension and confusion enabled by the process of positive disintegration, affective sedulity introduces a more capacious form of awareness of the inner world—which becomes an important developmental resource as a way of engaging with the outer world once the process of interment has been completed. As Stein (1983) described it,

when the process of separation is undertaken as a conscious work and fully assimilated and dealt with in its broader ramifications (‘burial’), the images that were once unconsciously identified with get converted into objective facts ‘out there’ and ‘then.’ Subjective identification is replaced by an objective relation. The point of psychological ‘burial’ is to effect this conversion.

(p. 42)

Put otherwise, the emotionally aware and conscious efforts of accessing and processing one’s past enable the transformation of previously unconscious forms of fusion into a psychologically proper form of externalization, where the past can be seen as disentangled from one’s current or future state.

The memorial process of recollection, recomposition, and interment occurs through the work of imaginative memoria that allows fresh access even to incomplete and inaccessible memories. This memorial process allows a separation from one’s earlier identity that Stein (1983) clarified formed “based on assumptions about who one is in relation to others…with a specific remembered past and imagined future” (p. 45), the beliefs about the self that arise from encounters with others. Recollection involves taking both the conscious identity as Stein defined it above, as well as inviting the unconscious to deliver the past hurts, memories, and beliefs that were involved in the primary integration and early persona formation. This also requires incorporating the “heroic” ideal image of the self, whose earlier functioning likely relates to one’s survival and accomplishments, but which remains too tied to the earlier persona to be of value moving forward (p. 33). Recomposition occurs as this blend of energetic tensions, emotions, and feelings combine with a whole image of the story of the former self—the known and unknown struggles, the goals accomplished and unfulfilled desires, and the estranged sorrows that belong to the project of this important and worthy creation. Seeing the totality of this past self, imaginatively figured as a whole or totality, is what allows for it to be completely grieved. Grief is required as stepping away form a former identity can seem like dying (p. 45). The work of recomposition allows the figured or imaged past identity (including its conscious and unconscious elements) to become an object within which one can relate. Once objectified, this figure of one’s past identity can then, as Hyde advised, be interred through a second act of burial in a site which is marked.

Grieving estranged sorrows through the imaginal interment process involves something similar to a waking dream. It means constructing a sense of an as-if past self, one that appears more fully when looking back than ever occurred when living it forward. One way to think of this recomposed past self is as an imaginal ego, or a version of one’s past life constructed from the more expansive memoria than the often-fragmented attempts to create a coherent biographical narrative at the level of story. Hillman (1972) described the imaginal ego as a kind of imaginal avatar (p. 188) that emerges from the memoria (p. 209) discussed in the previous section. Much like the version of the self that is witnessed in a dream (p. 185), the imaginal ego is a figure with whom we can identify without it being identical to our ongoing sense of self-identity. Building on Hillman’s depiction of an imaginal ego provides a way to conceive what figure is recomposed through the recollection process. Being able to identify and release this figure of the past self is similar to seeing oneself figured in a dream that is then released upon waking; as in a dream, also, the figure weaves together aspects that seem both familiar and peculiar. Unlike a dream figure, the imaginal ego is constructed for a purpose—interment—that allows a vehicle for a full expression of grief over the past, including all of its estranged sorrows. The figure fully reveals the unconscious sense of shame or guilt that may have been implicitly carried through life, encoded through trauma-imposed beliefs; however, in this process, the figure can be seen as heroic, misunderstood, valuable, and innocent.

The method of imaginal amplification provides an affective way of connecting to both estranged sorrows and the deep, essential self. Through an imagined context, it becomes possible to envision a sense of the self implied by the estranged sorrows that can be witnessed, honored, buried, and grieved. This frames the work of identity recovery through imaginal amplification as a finite task that can be accomplished. Knowing this helps the grieving process to feel more manageable—often, when people become aware that they carry deep grief (including estranged sorrows), the realization can sometimes be accompanied by a fear that the ensuing grieving process will be endless and all consuming. For this reason, fear can operate as a signal to turn back away from grieving and toward the protection provided by the trauma-imposed beliefs that remain as implicit guides from childhood. The kernel of truth to the fear is that moving through the process will totally consume the sense of self that was forged in childhood and which endured through the first half of life: what is more difficult to imagine is the potential that a new sense of self will form as a result. This “higher” self is unimaginable before the grieving process begins but becomes increasingly accessible through the process of secondary integration.

6. Recovery: Lamentation and the Mythic Return

This section demonstrates the importance of mythic amplification, the traditional form of amplification developed in Jung’s original work with patients. Myth provides an archetypal context that demonstrates the universal background underlying our unique and personal experiences. Experiencing how grief that has felt isolatingly intimate and violatingly vulnerable is part of a vast human tapestry allows a way of gaining distance from estranged sorrows while still staying in relation to it. It allows the presence of other, positive feelings to begin contextualizing the initial implicit memory so that if and when it comes to mind, a sense of pride (for past resilience) or compassion (with matured understanding) allow the surfacing sensation to arise with a sense of homecoming. This enables an ongoing work of self-discovery in a way that heals toward wholeness.

Myth offers another route that enables entry into the sphere of the imaginal (Polikoff, 2011, p. 523): its contexts allow us to see our lives through a more expansive mirror than we use when reflecting on our daily lives. Myth shows concerns, cares, and sorrows as interwoven into the constellations that make up the expansive tapestry of the human drama. Hillman (1975) could therefore champion the use of myth as providing an essential context for living psychologically. Thus, myths “simply give the invisible background which starts us imagining” (p. 158). Put otherwise, a mythic framework invites the process of moving out from the ongoing concerns of daily life and into deeper territory. This work of using a mythic context is part of the depth psychological tradition of amplification, which “employs myth to reveal archetypal patterns of psychological functioning and to elucidate the meaning of psychological events in the lives of contemporary individuals” (Stein, 1983, p. 113). In other words, mythic amplification is the process of finding the deep, universal resonances that allow for specific, troubling events in a person’s life to become visible as a fundamentally human problem. Seeing problems in this expansive context helps position struggles and sorrows as a door enabling participation in a storied human tradition: no longer a cause of isolation, the pain of grief becomes a source of connection to others who can bear knowing, silent witness.

The technique of amplification provides an important way to work with those who carry estranged sorrows because tragedies that remain unconscious relative to a personal life become imaginable once brought into the universal context. By identifying with a mythic figure, tradition, or motif and feeling the vast resonance of pathos, the unspeakable and indefinable nature of a person’s particular pain becomes a way of becoming part of a vast ocean of those who have suffered similarly. As Polikoff (2011) wrote, “myth possesses the capacity to bridge the difference between an individual’s particular experiences (including those of loss and pain) and the types of experience common to many and thus representative of a more general and unifying order of things” (p. 523). Rather than enforcing an isolated, silenced perspective, pain can suddenly be realized as the price paid for joining in this fuller, deeper human experience. This view of suffering reveals it as ennobling rather than deprivating. The experience of understanding the tragedy and sorrows woven into the mythic tapestry, knowing that one’s estranged sorrows participate in something deep and powerful, generates a simultaneous sense of being understood.

The method of narrative amplification described fiction’s function in facilitating ways forward for those suffering from estranged sorrows by opening up imaginal possibilities for expression. As Polikoff (2011) put it, “the very act of giving voice to sorrow—and inscribing that mourning in the form of a continuous sequence of writing—moves the raw experience of pain into another sphere: the sphere of ritual, myth, and literature” (p. 523). In other words, the sphere of myth offers a functional framework in which these stories can be imagined or through which new images or ideas can be articulated. At the same time, immense value is generated in being audience to such stories through the purifying work of catharsis. Ricoeur (1984) stated that catharsis arises in the structure of works of art that provide vehicles through which the audience embodies the unitive experience of thinking, imagining, and feeling that comprise catharsis. Further, Ricoeur (Ricoeur et al., 1988) adds that “catharsis sets the reader free for new evaluations of reality that will take shape in rereading” and “sets in motion a process of transposition, one that is not only affective but cognitive as well” (p. 176). In other words, witnessing creative and imaginative representations of pain can catalyze new avenues for thinking and feeling—and provide a platform for affective sedulity, the imaginal work of engaging with the heart-mind. Appreciating catharsis in this way implies a realm of healing that not only alleviates the alienating wounds from the past, but also an avenue that expands into a different kind of future.

One important literary exemplar of this process of amplifying grief in writing is found in Du Bois (2007, p. v). His work The Souls of Black Folk provided a way of amplifying personal anguish into increasingly vast social, historical, and ultimately mythic contexts. The Forethought announced his intention to work in the depths and provides an example of how to amplify grief on social and mythological levels. Beginning with “Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century” (p. v), Du Bois orients his reader with a task of unearthing and delving into “buried” issues that were easy to overlook. He continued by describing the goal of his work, “to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive”. The conjunction of uncertainty merged with the suggestion of the spiritual world provides the imaginal backdrop opening up the mythic dimensions that enrichen and enliven his works. This arrangement provides a liminal context for readers to imagine into before the book delves into the depths of griefs and sorrows created by the racial divide in American culture.

Having established this spiritual context, Du Bois (2007, p. v) turned to using the metaphor of the Veil to stand for “the problem of the color line” that he unfolds through his work. He thus promised to describe “the two worlds within and without the Veil”, and then, “venturing now into deeper detail”, deployed further spatial metaphors suggesting that his work unfolds through a depth psychology. This becomes even clearer as an underworld journey as Du Bois wrote, “Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses”. The deeper recesses into which Du Bois figured himself allow him to serve as a psychopomp, guiding the soul of the reader into the sufferings envisioned within. Through this writing, the Veil also becomes a Vale, an echo of the Vale of Soul-Making that serves as a central image for Hillman’s approach to archetypal psychology. One unique aspect of Du Bois’ work is his choice to begin each chapter with “a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past”. The use of song offers a way of accessing the depths of lamentation and grief designed to access the heart-mind, rather than simply deploying intellectual arguments. Finally, Du Bois ends his Forethought by acknowledging himself as one who has returned from the underworld: “I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil”, offering an emphasis on giving voice and language to the sinews of sorrow for those who are rendered speechless. The remainder of the book blends personal stories and anecdotes, sociological analysis, and mythical depictions of the racial crisis at the turn of the 20th century. Its potent, foundational way of providing word images to what had been unimaginable guaranteed its longstanding influence over the decades since its publication.

As Du Bois’ work suggests, the process of decomposition, disintegration and death discussed in terms of imaginal amplification is often mythically figured as a journey into the underworld. Amplification would point toward figures such as Orpheus or Psyche—those whose grief and loss moved them to enter into the world of the dead, and who emerged from it changed by the experience. What is often envisioned as a linear process of death and dying in our contemporary world is depicted mythically as a cycle of death and rebirth. Reading myths or engaging in stories that invoke deep suffering, characterizing it as a time in the abyss, and which formulate the potentiality of an empowering return (often with the gift of wisdom) provides the structure that allows inchoate suffering or estranged sorrows to surge forward in a moment of identification—recognizing the image as presenting something familiar, and feeling how this moment of recognition identifies something new and vital as part of an expanding sense of identity. Allowing this deep expanse of feeling is in large measure what enables a heart-mind engagement of affective sedulity as a way of engaging with the ordinary world after a return. Through this, it becomes possible to then imagine new potential avenues forward in one’s own life and circumstance.

7. Discussion

The primary difficulty with estranged sorrows is that they are often formed by non-event traumas and often resist both memory and language. As such, they are difficult to bring to mind or process consciously as experiences that can become part of a known past rather than unremembered present. Depth psychology, with its theorized space of the unconscious and its method of amplification, provides a way of working with estranged sorrows that allow them to be grieved. The use of the productive imagination in narrative amplification allows for a form of remembering that allows estranged sorrows to become stories. The use of affective sedulity in the memorial process (moving from recollection to recomposition to interment) allows images to become conscious experiences, including former self-images, enabling a healing work of identity recovery. The use of a distanced perspective in mythic amplification provides a way of reconceiving what had been painfully personal as what allows participation in a vast, universal human drama, enabling a healing work of community and belonging.

Without a truly different alternative, it would not be possible to leave the past behind. A cathartic experience would provide a powerful experience of release but would not catalyze further changes. This lack of a true alternative is the engine guiding trauma repetition—the circling around old patterns based on ongoing beliefs that prevent seeing other options. The slow pace of grieving provides a way to find a point of stillness, after which it becomes possible to change directions. The liminal process of grieving estranged sorrows is intentionally transformative, with a goal of opening a different way of moving forward in life than had been available. As a work of positive disintegration, imaginal grieving opens up an opportunity for secondary integration—a way to organize a sense of self with an expanded sense of available resources and an enlarged sense of inner potential. The process of recollection is likely to bring forward a second category of elements from the past that were also preserved in the past toward a later (midlife) reckoning. Stein (1983) argued that this category includes “unfinished developmental possibilities … rejected pieces of personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past”, noting that “life still clings strongly to them. And actually the seeds of the future lie in these neglected figures, which now return and call for restoration and attention” (p. 78). This outlines the positive dimension of recollection: gathering up unaccessed and forgotten potential strengths and talents that, neglected before, provide important support for the present. This undeveloped material becomes important for Dąbrowski’s secondary integration, the expansion of the self to a higher model of organization that was inaccessible at earlier stages of maturity and development. In this way, the process of working through estranged sorrows becomes a vitally important but temporary step on the path out of the underworld and into a new way of envisioning life.

8. Conclusions

The original work of conceiving estranged sorrows as a category of unprocessed implicit hurts adds to current research on trauma and grief. Although the three methods of amplification through the productive imagination are necessary for working with estranged sorrows, they also can provide new ideas for working with absence trauma and more standard forms of grief. This article offered an initial attempt at defining an overlooked dimension of trauma and healing within the field. In particular, this identified a kind of grief unrelated to a personal loss, grief that exists outside one’s conscious biographical experience. Absence and relational trauma provide an explanation for why this kind of grief exists. Because the sorrows are estranged from conscious awareness, I explored therapeutic approaches connected to depth psychology because these were developed as a way of providing insight and healing from symptoms connected to factors that remained outside conscious awareness. This kind of exploratory essay, however, falls short of proving the existence of estranged sorrows. Further, absence trauma was offered as a potential origin of estranged sorrow that accompanies work connecting estranged sorrow to larger-scale cultural changes (Boscaljon, 2025), but other inciting factors and other ways of approaching healing are capable of being explored.

The brief case study from Du Bois provided a clear example of the work of mythic amplification, but it lacked the kind of formal case study often supplied by analysts and therapists that builds on case material with specific individuals. Future research is needed to apply this model in clinical contexts as well as using the concepts of estranged sorrows and imaginal healing as a heuristic for exploring powerful literary works.