Amputated Selfhood and Phantom Selves: Musings and Reflections on Heretofore Unformulated Experience

Abstract

In this article, I have drawn from my personal experience of exile and my work with patients suffering from similar devastation to illustrate an understanding of traumatic loss and its long-term impact on one’s experience of being in the world. I describe the image of traumatic loss as being an amputation of one’s own experience of being in the world, analogizing that experience to the amputation of a bodily part. I am proposing as well that parts of ourselves that can no longer go on being in relationship to the absent and grieved significant others in our lives are experienced as phantom selves. Using these metaphors permits us to re-conceptualize traumatic loss, broadening our understanding of the long-term effects of grief and mourning. In this effort I am neither pathologizing the senses of amputation or phantom selves, nor am I imposing a designated healing time, or any time when healing ensues at all. Rather, I conceptualize phantom selfhood as a healthy response to trauma that engages the imagination and allows us to preserve a sense of what was lost in order that we may provide a relational continuity within ourselves. I use the term phantomization to describe an unhealthy process by which an individual who has lost a loved one, or has been traumatically displaced, lives solely in an imaginary world of being with the loved one or within the lost place. The phantomized individual is unable to be present in his life and lives predominately in a phantom or illusory world.