Parental loss during childhood is a critical life event (Inglehart 1991), which may even result in a trauma because of its pronounced experience of loss. This happens when images and thoughts about this experience emerge recurrently, limiting the concerned person's capacity of taking any action. In such a case, a flood of emotions builds up, which keeps the affected person from including this event of loss in his or her realm of experiences, both biography-related and everyday experiences. The same is true for the person's scope for action: an experience of parental loss during childhood may lead to actual diseases, limit the person's personal development or have other undesirable effects. The loss of a parent may be repressed and might be very hard to consciously remember in all detail because it puts too much strain on the person's psyche. Keeping this event in an unconscious part of our psyche might seem to be a defence mechanism. However, events that have not bee...