Book: Necessary Losses

Overview
Judith Viorst’s 1986 book Necessary Losses argues that growth is built on what we must give up. Drawing on psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, literature, and interviews, she traces the lifelong series of relinquishments that shape a coherent self: from the infant’s surrender of omnipotence to the adult’s acceptance of imperfect love, thwarted ambitions, aging, and death. Loss is not an aberration to be avoided but a condition of attachment, freedom, and meaning. The book’s central claim is that mourning these losses, rather than denying or bypassing them, enables maturity, resilience, and a more realistic capacity for joy.

Early Life: Separation and the End of Omnipotence
The first necessary losses arrive with birth, weaning, and the discovery that mother is separate. Viorst, echoing Bowlby and Winnicott, describes how dependence gives way to a precarious autonomy supported by transitional objects, routines, and the toleration of frustration. The child must relinquish fantasies of total gratification and perfect caretakers, learning that love includes absence, delay, and limits. This early ambivalence, loving and resenting the same people, lays the groundwork for empathy: accepting others as separate persons rather than extensions of the self. Failures here reverberate in later clinging, avoidance, or the demand for flawless partners.

Adolescence: Illusions and Identity
Adolescence requires shedding the certainties of childhood and the idealized or demonized images of parents. Testing limits, awakening sexuality, and battles over authority are not simply rebellion but steps toward an integrated identity. To grow, the adolescent must give up grandiose fantasies of exemption from rules and risk, and tolerate the anxiety of choice and consequence. Viorst emphasizes that a stable adult self depends on relinquishing both childish dependency and the adolescent’s all-or-nothing standards, replacing them with complexity, compromise, and accountable freedom.

Love and Marriage: Fantasies, Compromise, and Fidelity
Romantic love confronts us with renunciations: choosing one partner means relinquishing infinite possibilities, privacy, and the dream of seamless union. Viorst explores the losses entwined with intimacy, jealousy, dependency, conflict, and the ways that idealization yields to a sober, warmer fidelity. Mature love accepts that partners cannot heal every childhood wound nor satisfy every need. Marriage becomes a continuing negotiation between separateness and closeness, where conflict, honestly navigated, strengthens trust. Friendship, too, demands realism about limits, reciprocity, and the inevitability of change across life stages.

Work, Ambition, and the Roads Not Taken
Adult identity is shaped as much by the careers and talents we forgo as by the ones we pursue. Viorst argues for the psychological task of mourning unlived lives, accepting that time, talent, and luck are finite. Envy, disappointment, and perfectionism are addressed not by denial but by embracing “good enough” standards that make room for competence, meaning, and pleasure. Letting go of omnipotent striving opens space for gratitude and sustained effort.

Parents, Children, and the Cycle of Letting Go
Becoming a parent brings a double relinquishment: surrendering former freedoms and accepting that children must eventually separate. Viorst details the grief of milestones, first day of school, adolescence, departure, paired with pride in the child’s autonomy. Later, the roles reverse as adult children confront the frailty and death of parents. Grieving real people, rather than fantasies of perfect or perfectly awful parents, frees us to carry forward what was nurturing and to amend what harmed.

Aging, Mortality, and Acceptance
Midlife and old age require releasing illusions of unending youth, endless time, and boundless possibility. Bodies change, roles shift, and losses accumulate. Viorst distinguishes fruitful mourning, which integrates loss into a renewed capacity for love and work, from sterile brooding that freezes the self in grievance. Acceptance of finitude clarifies values, deepens connections, and lends urgency to everyday kindness and creative effort. Necessary losses, properly grieved, do not diminish life; they shape a durable self able to love within limits and to find meaning in transience.