Everything that an old friendship that has ended says about us

Despite being an inevitable event, losing friends late in life is difficult and heartbreaking. The death of a friend can unleash a storm of emotions. It leaves us with the feeling of having lost a part of ourselves, especially if that person belonged to our closest circle and has accompanied us through thick and thin, as a source of strength, accomplice and sounding board. The intimacy of friendship, writes philosopher Jacques Derrida, “lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of the other.” But, curiously, there is another type of loss of friends that can be even more difficult to face and we want to analyze here: disconnection in life. Because in this case it is an ambiguous loss, which causes mourning for a person who is alive, something that can be even more emotionally complex. The role of friends tends to be more important as we get older, but it also becomes more difficult to keep them. How is this understood?

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche captures the nature of disturbing strangeness in his maxim titled Friends as ghosts (Die Freunde als Gespenster): “If we change significantly, those friends who have not changed become ghosts of our own past: their voice reaches us with a terrifying, spectral sound; as if we heard ourselves, but younger, severe, immature.” The spectrum of the friend, for Nietzsche, includes metaphorical connotations that have to do with fading, the ambiguous, the intangible, what cannot be experienced in immediacy. He designates something ambivalent, perhaps indeterminate, it can be someone familiar and strange at the same time – it is a presence that, paradoxically, is revealed in the lack of it -.

It's natural for friendships to transform as we navigate life. From leaving or changing jobs to moving, it can take us away from friends. And it's common to hear people say that they don't have enough hours in the day to tackle tasks on their to-do list, much less keep up with old friends. These transitions can lead to a breakup. As we age, our priorities change and make it difficult to reconcile with those of old friends. On this journey it is understandable that some friendships fall by the wayside. And when we are in the place of the one left behind, it can be devastating to face that someone who had been so close to us, by dint of a unilateral decision, is no longer so.

Growing differences, misunderstandings or unresolved conflicts are often the cause. One of the main triggers is the loss of trust. Fear plays an important role—fear of rejection, of being exploited, or of compromising one's identity. At the same time and in another area, the mechanism that dismantles the relationship with a friend may obey unconscious forces, of which the person is not aware. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls them “primitive agonies.” What happens in the present is something that has already occurred in the psyche and is projected into the future—that which cannot be consciously identified imposes itself on our reality and is repeated. In an attempt to free itself from ties to the painful past, time and time again, the human unconscious takes us to the original place where things went wrong, with the desire to do it all over again and repair the damage. The friendship at stake becomes the theater in which the disruptive unfolds, and the breakup embodies the repetition of an ancestral loss, abandonment, or traumatic separation—hence the disproportion between the caliber of the grievance and that of its consequences.

I observe this in some patients, who unconsciously intercept my ability to work as their psychoanalyst: instead of looking for connections and meaning, they ensure that relationships cannot be strengthened between the past and the present, between ideas and feelings, or between them and I. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, in his article Link attacksdescribes it as the way people try to navigate the painful truths of their lives—connections are replaced by disconnections—to escape the pain of self-discovery.

In short, losing a friend when we are older can be discouraging. But, on the other hand, it is the beginning of a transition towards another version of oneself. Research has shown that while estrangement is associated with deep feelings of loneliness, it can also lead to improved quality of life. It is not just loss, it is also an opportunity to embark on renewing experiences. This may seem counterintuitive, but it simply means that by letting go of the familiar, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities.

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