On Natality: Beginning to Be Limited

Through the personal reflection on chronic pain, the author engages the question of how clinicians and their patients manage various forms of loss within the clinical encounter. The notion of developmental grief is introduced as a stepping-stone from phallicism to genitality, whereby the capacity to grieve and thus tolerate limitedness enables growth. Hannah Arendt's concept of natality is offered as a hopeful corrective to the resistance to accepting limitations.