You can die of heartbreak. That is the conclusion of a study published in Open Heart that shows the long-term risks of losing a loved one. They found that it correlates with incidences of acute arrhythmia up to a year following an unexpected death, at which point the risk returns to normal levels.



When we love, we can love with all our heart, meaning it is absolutely physical, bodily, somatic. That is why love is valued so highly by civilization, providing the greatest pleasures and the deepest pains. Love is pure risk. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, a novel about heartbreak from the beginning of life to death, was going to be named Intermittencies of the Heart. Intermittencies is another name for arrhythmia.

So what makes heartbreak tip some people towards death? Freud investigated the mysterious forces of what he called the life and death drives – Eros and Thanatos respectively, though Eros is perhaps closer to love than life, Freud associated it with vitality and procreation. Freud is at pains to show that the two forces are in a rather delicate balance with one another, easily disrupted by reality, especially trauma, which causes one to spill into the other.



Freud’s definition of trauma is the unanticipated overwhelming of the psyche, which is unable to manage this intruding excess. It resorts to various counter-intuitive strategies like repeating the event in memory and dreams over and over again, trying to gain a semblance of control.

It is quite difficult to sway something in the past, something that is simply a memory; and Freud was bewildered by this system seemingly gone haywire. This mirrors this recent study, which shows that traumatic unanticipated loss, and the stress that follows from it, directly affects the heart and can even potentially stop it.

Interestingly, traumatic loss is also related by Freud to depression or melancholia, where the loss of a loved one isn’t mourned in a typical fashion, a process Freud said took a year to two years, but instead wreaks havoc internally and indefinitely.



The effects of melancholia take place on a biological level, where Freud said the mind acts like a hemorrhaging wound, a container with no bottom, which is at the root of the strange somatic symptoms of depression, from vegetative paralysis and sleeplessness, to the experience of actual somatic pain.



Freud said that doctors should understand that this process is actually physically painful, suggesting the work of the death drive could actually be felt. Indeed, its strange rhythm is rather literal in this study on traumatic loss arrhythmia. Many have also pointed out that those who suffer from heartbreak syndrome have often failed to report their heart-pains to their doctors – perhaps because it was only one piece of the general pain of grief. This proves fatal since early intervention is critical.

What is the take-away? In a funny, characteristic aside, typical of Freud’s misogyny and general misapprehension of female psychology, he notes that women tend to put all of their eggs in the basket of love which, while affording one of the highest pleasures in life, was a rather unwieldy bet, in contrast to say gardening or scientific research. He seemed worried that this wager left women vulnerable, not only to disappointment and loss, but to falling ill, stress and perhaps to the effects of the death drive more generally.

Freud insists all of us, men and women alike, should not pour Eros into itself, love into love, but into something else, far removed: like plants. Unlike partners or parents, they won’t let you down. So should we love plants or, say, pottery, and not people? Especially people who can’t keep promises when it comes to loving you forever? No, I think the message is rather the reverse. Matters of the heart are never simple.



Losing love is difficult, painful, and, as we now know, even potentially fatal. The work of mourning takes a long time. You aren’t in the clear until a year or even two years out, that’s why we need to make more room for the potential vicissitudes of loss and trauma. Only then will we find a new, more harmonious arrangement between the inevitable and necessary forces of life and death.

