As we have seen in P.1, in mourning, our memories and hopes linked to the one we've lost are run through, and each is met with the judgment that the person is no longer there. This process of surveying and reshuffling thoughts and images will eventually exhaust itself, and the mourner will choose life over death. In pathological or complicated mourning, this process is arrested, due primarily to the presence of powerful feelings of hate mixed with our love for the deceased. In melancholia, the unconscious hatred of the one we've lost twists back to submerge us: we rage against ourselves as we once raged against the other, due to our unconscious identification with them. We have become what we could not bear to give up.How, then, did the psychoanalytic community respond to Freud's essay? Surprisingly, everyone disagreed. The two most important replies were first from the Berlin analyst Karl Abraham and then, some years later, from Melanie Klein. Both Klein and Abraham thought that Freud's polarization of mourning and melancholia was too rigid. They questioned the very distinction between them that had been pivotal to Freud's argument. Although they developed different theories here, what linked Klein's and Abraham's perspectives was a basic observation: that our earliest relations with our caregivers in infancy begin in ambivalent settings. Love and hate are always directed towards the same people, however much we might try to separate out our emotions or to deny them. Although Freud had of course discussed this, they felt he hadn't taken"" it far enough. He had confined the conflict of emotions to the state of pathological mourning, they thought it, when it was in fact central to all forms of mourning. If we try to amplify Freud's theory with the ideas of Abraham and Klein however, we still have a problem.
For example what happened to the social dimension of mourning? The analytic perspectives we have reviewed seem to dispense completely with the role of other people. Mourning is treated as a private event and not as a public, social process. In Death, Grief and Mourning, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer pointed out that every documented human society has mourning rituals which involve public displays. Besides funeral rituals, even dress codes could reveal that someone had been bereaved, whom they had lost and how long it had been since the loss. Black clothes would be worn in many Western countries, although early Christians were in fact instructed to wear white to distinguish themselves from the heathen. In Syria, light blue is the color of mourning, while it is white for Hindus and for the Chinese. Other details of color or style would indicate whether the loss had been of a parent or of a sibling, when it had taken place, and further information about the loss. These outward signs would help to inscribe the mourner within a shared, public space. Gorer and others argued that the decline of public mourning rituals in the West was linked to the mass slaughter of the First World War. The surplus of the dead - and bereaved - was far more extreme and concentrated than in earlier warfare, and so profound changes were forced on society. What sense would it make for a community to mourn each dead soldier when the corpses were hardly even countable?
Significantly, it was precisely during this period that Freud began writing his essay. In that sense, the understanding of mourning as an individual problem came at just the time that it was becoming more distanced from community life. The outward manifestations of mourning were becoming more and more obscured as grief moved inwards. In the majority of cases, modem Western mourners do not follow a set dress code or manifest their pain outwardly. Instead, they are supposed to work it through themselves, as if mourning were solely a private process.
Jackie Kennedy's stoicism at the funeral of her husband is perhaps the most famous example of this image of a contained grief. Even though the funeral was a major public event, televised nationally for millions of viewers, there was no outpouring of grief, no tears or wailing. Those who had never even met the president certainly experienced these signs of emotion, but Jackie's calmness became emblematic of a grief that was internalized and not displayed. Although some saw this as a model of courage and fortitude, others shared the view of one commentator that it 'set mourning back a hundred years'.
The erosion of public mourning rituals continues today in many parts of the world that had not experienced the mass slaughter of the great wars. In African societies, the toll of AIDS has meant that mourning and burial rituals that have been practiced for hundreds of years are now being abandoned or abridged. HIV-AIDS is now the leading cause of death for people aged between fifteen and fifty-nine in Tanzania and other countries. The sheer quantity of the dead means that it is no longer feasible to retain traditional ritual processes, and economic plight makes many such practices, such as the sacrifice of animals, impossible. We must ask what the consequences of this destruction of the social fabric will be. And what its consequences have been in the West, where mourning rituals have already collapsed.
There is an odd, paradoxical effect of this erosion. Where the great taboo of Victorian culture had been sex, Gorer thought that today it is death. We might object that in fact today we are continually assailed by images of violent death, in the cinema, on television, and in the media. But one could see, in turn, this ramification as a strict consequence of the disappearance of mourning rites. Without the symbolic support of mourning rites, images of death simply proliferate to the point of meaninglessness.
Many if not most, TV viewers in fact watch images of death every night in the TV shows about crime scene investigation and murder that fill up the evening schedule. It is amazing to realize that this is what so many people do after work: something in which someone dies and whose death is subsequently explained and made sense of The fact that this is reiterated endlessly suggests that death is ultimately not something that can be made sense of And that the increasingly violent images multiply in the absence of a symbolic framework that might mediate them.
In a remark made by Melanie Klein in her paper on mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. Sometimes, she says, the mourning process can be aided if our internal objects - meaning one's unconscious representations of other people - are mourning with us. 'In the mourner's state of mind,' she writes, 'the feelings of his internal objects are also sorrowful. In his mind, they share his grief, in the same way as actual kind parents would. The poet tells us that "Nature mourns with the mourner.'" This comment provides the crucial link between the personal and the social that we are looking for. It suggests that our own access to mourning can be helped if we perceive that other people are mourning too. This apparently simple point in fact opens up a wealth of questions and new perspectives on the mourning process.
Recent controversies over the phenomena of public grief are telling here. When Princess Diana died, public responses verged on hysteria, leading cynics to claim that the tears were not real. But this misses the point, for one could seriously argue that these tears are for the dead figures themselves. Rather, it is precisely the public framework that allows people to articulate their own grief for other, unrelated losses. The thousands of letters that Dickens received after the death of his character Little Nell made him think that he had committed a real murder, yet it was surely the social, shared aspect of this fictional death that allowed each reader to access their own grief, even without knowing it. This is a basic function of public mourning rituals. The public facilitates the private.
Cynics today who complain of 'mourning sickness' fail to remember that for many centuries professional mourners would be hired for funerals. What sense could be made of this age-old practice unless we factored in the relation between public and private? As the professional mourners lamented and bewailed the passing of the dead, the mourners could access their own private grief. The public, ostentatious display of others was necessary for them to enter their own grief. The very fact that these hired hands were professionals signals the gap between public and private. If they were too close, perhaps the outward manifestations of sadness would seem less like signs, artificial elements that were well rehearsed. Without this artificial distance, the mourner remains in the same space as the dead, rather than being able to situate their loss within a different, more symbolic space.
Let's take another example. Mark Roseman's book The Past in Hiding tells the story of Marianne Ellenbogen, a young Jewish woman who survived underground in Nazi Germany. Roseman interviewed Ellenbogen when she was an elderly woman living in England in the 1980s. But his narrative does not rely simply on these interviews: he also draws on her contemporary diaries together with information gathered from a number of other sources. The book is rare in its bold handling of a difficult subject: what intetests Roseman is less to paint a picture of heroism and valour than to examine the tensions between fiction and non-fiction in Marianne's own narrative. Her diaries from the war often tell a very different story from her later reconstructions, just as both of these sources sometimes conflict with external accounts.
Martha Wolfenstein discusses the blocked mourning of an adolescent girl, whose mother had died of a brain hemorrhage when she was fifteen. After the funeral, she found herself unable to cry, and was relieved to meet another girl who had experienced a similar reaction after the death of her own father. Yet the dialogue of mourning’s was inflected here with a sense of terror. She dreamt that her grandfather leaned close to her and said 'Let us mingle our tears.' Whether we agree with Wolfenstein or not that this menacing figure represented the father, the horror that the dream aroused in the daughter was clearly incestuous. Perhaps in this case the mother's death meant not just the loss of a loved parent but also being left alone with the surviving one. Manifesting sorrow could then only confirm the new and disturbing closeness between father and daughter: being united in grief meant, for her, a form of being united. Her anxiety was a signal of the danger of this incestuous desire.
If the comparison of mourning processes can be complex and multi-layered, what about those instances where the very possibility of comparison seems to be ruled out? The most evident - and perhaps the only - example of such a barrier in our culture is the Holocaust. When Sylvia Plath dared to use images of the Holocaust in her poem 'Daddy' to dramatize personal, autobiographical threads, the response was outrage and anger. If we take seriously the argument about the resonance between mourning’s, this produces a number of problems: in particular, the seal of prohibition on comparison that marks representations of the Holocaust prevents the pattern of mourning we have discussed from taking place. On a clinical level, this is a crucial point. Think of all those cases where a loss in a family has not been openly mourned. What consequences will this have, we can ask, on the children? How can they mourn if they are deprived of the very possibility of a dialogue of mourning’s?
Symbolizing a separation or death is a necessary part of being able to start thinking about it. During the dictatorship in Argentina, mothers of men and women who had disappeared - no doubt to be tortured and killed by the police and military - would assemble on Thursdays at a public monument to independence in one of Buenos Aires' main squares. Silently, they would circle the monument, each holding a handkerchief on which was inscribed the name of the missing child and the date of their disappearance. As the psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni pointed out, they were insisting on the minimal symbolic gesture that an inscription mark the dead or departed.
Such inscriptions are a rudimentary form of knowledge, indexing a death or separation rather than hiding it. Yet we so often hear in analytic practice of the weight placed upon a child by some knowledge about one of the parents that they have been told to keep to themselves: an infidelity, an impending separation, a crime. Having to keep the secret might make them faithful to the parent in question, but the pressure of retaining the secret can be ravaging. When it comes to questions of illness and death, this pressure can be just as acute. There may be an awareness of an impending death or knowledge of the true cause of death which is not shared, or, in other cases, an exclusion from the facts, as we often see when there has been a suicide in a family.
Geoffrey Gorer observed that it had become a commonplace by the mid-twentieth century to hide a patient's fatal diagnosis from them. Where the historian of childhood Philippe Aries found a preparedness for death in earlier cultural testimonies, both he and Gorer saw the contemporary problem as precisely this relation of death to knowledge. Cultures tend to rationalize this troubling question in different ways. In Iran, for example, to receive tragic news of a death when alone or away from one's family is believed by some to lead to a specific form of illness, so Iranians abroad are often not told of a death until they return home months or even years later. This practice, however common, in no way lessens the adverse effect of being excluded from knowledge.
Contemporary Western culture inflects this problem of knowledge in its own way: where children were once gathered around a deathbed, today we hear increasingly of their separation. Aries notes that until the eighteenth century no portrayal of a deathbed scene failed to include children. And where a parent decides it is for the good of the child to keep them away from a funeral, we may hear about it decades later with a sense of disappointment or resentment. The relation of the bereaved to the dead person is one thing, but this will be affected by ho..w those around the bereaved have responded to the loss. As humans, don't we need others to authenticate our losses?
After a traumatic loss, we need to receive the message that something terrible has happened. If this seems obvious, think of the many cases where the only response is denial or blankness. To take one example, we probably all know of cases where a miscarriage is passed over in silence. At least 15 per cent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, and it is clear that society often gives little space for a mourning here. What is a tragedy for the mother and the father may be ignored or denied by others, blocking the designation of the event as a loss. Yet there is a vital human need to designate events symbolically.
In one case, after a miscarriage, a woman had a dream in which she was told that a tragedy had occurred. The whole dream took place as a performance, as if all the characters were acting. They tell her there is a 'cavity' inside her and the video monitors in the room in her dream evoked those next to her in the hospital when she miscarried. The loss here is moving towards being represented, and this representation is made public, woven into a broader structure. The way in which a private grief is transformed here into a kind of public performance suggests something about what art itself is about. What place, after all, do literature, theatre, cinema and the other visual and plastic arts have in human culture? Could their very existence be linked to the human necessity to mourn?
When today's schoolchildren are taught emotional literacy, the idea is to help them to express their emotions. They are taught a language to articulate what they are feeling and what others are feeling. This well-intentioned practice is sadly tantamount to brainwashing, in the sense that it imposes a language on the individual and coerces them to use it in place of their own unique ways of expressing themselves. The casualties here are the subjects of literature, drama and art for a very precise reason. These do not force a pre-set language on children but expose them to a variety of ways of creating, from Shakespeare to Picasso, from J. K. Rowling to Tracey Emin. Children are thus confronted with the ways that individuals have responded in their own unique fashion to the experience of frustration, sadness and loss. And, as we have seen with the idea of the dialogue of mournings, it might be this very fact that will encourage them to find their own solutions to the difficulties they are facing.
As the psychoanalyst Ginette Raimbault observed,the work of writers, artists, poets and musicians is very important to help bring out the universal nature of what a mourner feels, but not in the sense that they will all feel the same thing. On the contrary, 'What no one can understand about my pain, someone can express in such a way that I can recognize myself in what I cannot share.'
When the American journalist Vincent Sheean was mourning the death of his beloved friend Mahatma Gandhi, he described two different ways in which words went through his head. One was the 'ordinary way' of words pronounced, 'words sounding in the inner air'. But the other was like 'ticker tape - words visible in the mind', usually but not always unheard. Most of them were from Shakespeare and the Bible, and they were thrown up with an 'agonising suddenness and an effect of unbearable truth each time'. Sitting in the rose-garden not far from where the Mahatma lay, phrases like 'I cried to him from the depths and he answered me' would impose themselves on Sheean with utter clarity although he had made no effort to summon them up.
This strange efflorescence of words is perhaps an attempt to name what is most real, the hole that has opened up in that person's life. Ordinary language with its networks of meaning and conventional codes is not enough: instead, there is an appeal to a different register within language, words without meaning, empty phrases or even insults repeated again and again. What this example shows is how these words, rather than being chosen by the writer, choose them.
This emphasis on the materiality of language may strike a chord with our own experiences of loss. We are witnessing how words converge at the point of what is most unbearable for us, and the clarity of this process gives literary testimonies like in the above example, an added power. They don't just tell us what it was like, but actually show how words are functioning, as if to stage this aspect of grief before our very eyes. They show us not just a loss but how something can be created from loss.
In contrast to this example, mourning can often also result, not in the creation of words, narratives and works of art but in new symptoms. Here for example George Pollock, reports the case of a young woman whose father had died suddenly when she was thirteen. She described a daily depression which began at 5.30 p.m. when her husband got back from work. The feelings would emerge at the moment she heard the key turning in the lock. In her analysis, she realized that as a child she had excitedly waited for her father's return from work each day. Although she apparently denied his death, her afternoon depressions took the place of a mourning. In another case, a man's depression would appear with greatest intensity on Tuesday afternoons, the day of his mother's death when he was fourteen. Such anniversary reactions are amazingly common, yet most often go unnoticed since the person is unaware of the link themselves and the doctor may not be alert to the unconscious processes at play.
As later analysts investigated these anniversary reactions, they found that they occurred especially in cases of physical illness. Bodily symptoms ranging from the mild to the serious would emerge on the anniversary of an important date, usually one linked to a bereavement or separation. In one of the first large-scale hospital studies in the U.S., it was found that adult hospitalization dates coincided remarkably with the anniversaries of childhood losses. After his own mother's death, Pollock became fascinated with these forms of unconscious timekeeping. The appearance of anniversary symptoms indicated that the work of mourning had not been successful, so that these punctual, residual phenomena remained.
When the writer Gogol was sixteen, his father became ill and died two years later at the age of forty- three. On hearing the news, he wrote to his mother 'True, at first I was terribly stricken by this news; however, I didn't let anyone know I was saddened. But when I was left alone, I gave myself up to all the .power of mad desperation. I even wanted to make an attempt on my own life.' This is exactly what Gogol did more than twenty years later, when he committed suicide through stagnation at the age of forty-three. Shortly before he died, he said that his father had died at the same age and 'of the same disease.
The work of analysts on anniversary reactions is supported by anthropological research. When Geoffrey Gorer was studying the erosion of mourning rituals in industrialized societies, he observed how this absence could have effects in the flesh itself. Physical symptoms in the bereaved were found by many studies to be much more frequent in those geographical regions where mourning rituals were least prevalent. The greater the symbolic, social elaboration of death, the more the mourner's grief would be woven into the community. Physical symptoms and somatizations would occur when mourning was blocked or unsuccessful.
Anniversary reactions, Pollock showed, would emerge not only when the person reached the age of the deceased, but also when they reached the age of a third party linked to the deceased. Pollock observed that in cases where the father's death occurred before that of the mother, anniversary symptoms often emerged on reaching the age of the mother at the time of the father's death. Also, the person might fall ill at the moment that their own child reached the age they had been when their parent had died or separated from them. This is something we see very often in analytic practice: someone becomes acutely depressed in adult life, yet nothing of any significance seems to have happened to them in the recent past. As we learn more, we discover that the depression has been precipitated by the birthday of one of their children, who has now reached the age which that person was when they had experienced a loss or tragedy in their own childhood.
Such forms of timekeeping are very common, and use not only dates but many other markers to index the past. Whenever the actress Billie Whitelaw heard the popular song 'You are my sunshine', she would be overcome by an inexplicable sadness. The feeling would engulf her but she simply didn't understand why, until, some thirty years later, her mother mentioned that she would cry after her father's death while listening to this record, as it reminded her of his going away. After learning this from her mother, Whitelaw no longer felt her sadness. A connection of memories had taken the place of this anniversary-style reaction.
Pollock saw this as one aim of psychoanalysis: to allow memories to take the place of anniversary reactions. But he also felt that certain losses could never be adequately mourned, such as that of a dead child by a mother. This raises a number of questions about the apparent 'closure' of the process of mourning. The documented prevalence of anniversary symptoms suggests that in fact most bereaved people have not 'got over' their loss. Records from GP surgeries will reveal that many patients return in exactly the same week or month as their previous visit, even if these trips are spaced out over a number of years. Rather than access their memories, the body commemorates them.
These problems are often obscured by shallow pictures of the mourning process. Innumerable textbooks tell us what to expect after the experience of a loss. First, a stunned reaction and sense of numbness. Then a denial of the facts, followed by a period of anger. The anger may then metamorphose into a time of magical thinking, when we hope to re-find the loved one. And this may be followed by a depressive spell and then finally a gradual acceptance of the loss. Although these surface descriptions can be informative, they tell us little about the mechanisms involved, and, more significantly, they do not alert us to phenomena like the anniversary reactions we have discussed. In order to understand better the psychology of mourning, we need to move beyond mere descriptions of behavior and continue to explore the changes in unconscious mental life which may take place in this painful, difficult period.
The first question to ask here is what does a mourning need to accomplish? Should we be prescriptive or just accept that it will be different for different people? The frequency of blocked and arrested mourning’s means that we cannot shy away from these questions. If mourning so often goes wrong, we are obliged to ask what it would need to go right. Many people remain trapped throughout their lives in mourning’s that never end. The work of mourning, Freud observes, may seem to actually prolong the existence of the one we have lost. As the mental process of bringing up memories and hopes linked to the one we've lost continues, how does it know when to stop?
If movi~ through all these details, memories and expectations prolongs the existence of the lost loved one, we might wonder how this can be reconciled with the idea that the process results in a detachment, a distancing. Does something further have to take place? And is there a moment in the process when the existence of the mourned object slides into non-existence? Freud's formulation might seem to imply that there will be a point when all aspects of our attachment will be run through and it will be met with a resounding judgement of non-existence. It suggests that, beyond the actual 'work' of mourning described by Freud, something has to happen to this work.
Analytic writers have been divided on this issue: 'Mourning is for life,' said the psychoanalyst Margaret Little, and although a clinician with the acumen of Helene Deutsch could speak of a necessity to mourn, she was later skeptical about any completion of internal processes. Freud, likewise, took care to point out how a loss could never be entirely compensated for. In a 1929 letter to Binswanger, he wrote: We will never find a substitute [after a loss]. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be, it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.
In Electra's words, 'Never will sorrow forget.' But why should mourning imply forgetting? After Albert's death, Queen Victoria famously kept her husband's study exactly as it had been when he was alive, prohibiting change of a single detail. Every day, his linens were changed and his clothes laid out, and water prepared for his shaving. We keep mementoes, objects and the possessions of the dead to remind us, not to make us forget. Forgetting, indeed, is often deemed improper. Speaking of the death of her husband, John Maynard Keynes, the Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova said that she had worn his pajamas for years to keep him close to her. Yet later she could say, 'When he died I suffered a lot. I thought that I could never live without him. Yet now I never think of him.'
The cliché that losses need to be worked through so that we can move beyond them suggests that mourning is something that can be done and dusted. We are encouraged so often to 'get over' a loss, yet bereaved people and those who have experienced tragic losses know full well that it is less a question of getting over a loss and on with life, than finding a way to make that loss a part of one's life. Living with loss is what matters, and writers and artists show us the many different ways in which this can be done. But what are its preconditions? What needs to happen for a mourning to be able to take place?
We have emphasized the role of other people in mourning. How someone else has shown their reaction to a loss will be crucial for the way that we, in turn, deal with our own losses. But how far can this unconscious transaction go? If it might get a mourning started in many cases, it is not enough to keep it going: the momentum must have other sources, and a number of things need to happen during a mourning which take place beyond our conscious awareness. This raises some crucial questions: what are the unconscious processes that characterize the work of mourning? And once a mourning gets started, can it ever really end?Clinicians working with the bereaved and those who have suffered difficult separations have noticed a peculiar phenomenon. A mourning is often punctuated by dreams which, unlike others, do not call out for interpretation. They are more like indications of where the mourner is in the process, a kind of mapping of their situation. And among these dreams a special motif frequently emerges: doorways, arches, stages and the many other features that serve to frame a space.
Now, psychoanalysis does not accept that there are any fixed dream-symbols. A snake in one person's dream may evoke the phallus, but in another's may be linked to a childhood scene involving a real snake, just as it may represent someone in that person's circle of family or friends. What an image stands for will depend on the particular history of each individual and the context of each dream. A frame may of course be linked to this particularity, but its appearance in such dreams does indicate something very basic beyond any idea of symbolism: that space is divided up, and that one space now becomes the object of special attention. What can this tell us about mourning?
Freud's account of the process of mourning involves, as we've seen, the idea of an exhaustion of representations. The representations of the lost object are brought again and again into painful focus and the memories and hopes linked to it met by the judgment that the object no longer exists. As this process continues, so the work of mourning will gradually exhaust itself But how might such a process be distinguished from one in which the subject remains haunted by representations? What, after all, is to stop the piecemeal process described by Freud from continuing for ever? At what point does the cycle exhaust itself, if at all? This is where the motif of the frame becomes especially interesting.
A frame divides up space. And, in a very precise sense, it draws attention to whatever lies within its boundaries. Imagine watching a sunset and enjoying its beauty. Now, imagine that we put a frame around the image of the sunset. This will remind us that what we're looking at is an image, a representation, perhaps one that culture has taught us to see as beautiful. We might have been lost in the beauty of the scene, but the frame is saying, 'This is a representation; it is conditioned.' In other words, a frame draws attention to the artificial nature of what we see.
Eighteenth-century humorists made much of this . type of conditioning, poking fun at how the public was being taught to see certain outdoor scenes as 'nature'.
Jane Austen evokes this artificiality slyly in Northanger Abbey, when we learn that Catherine Morland has dismissed her view of the city of Bath from Beechen Cliff as 'unworthy to make part of a landscape'. The very idea of 'landscape' was forged by culture, not nature. When we become aware of this kind of framing, the image has been shifted to another level: it now inhabits a different space, the space of signs, a representational space. It is no longer simply an object - the sunset - but the representation of that object. It is situated in another register.
We can see this in the very particular ways that Renaissance portraits introduce frames. Many of them include a frame within the picture itself, using stone columns or the wall of a balcony as in the 'Mona Lisa', or creating one in the form of the actual background scenery. The Russian critic Boris Uspensky drew attention to the way that frames and backgrounds have the same function here: they indicate that what we see takes place on an artificial stage, in a symbolic as opposed to a real space. The backgrounds would be painted according to an artistic system which differed from that used in the rest of the painting. Whereas the main figure would be painted using certain codes of size and scale, the background would depict landscape using an alternative system, often one that could not be found in the real world. Mountains, castles and other features would be situated in an impossible space, clashing with the realism and detail of the human figure. The same logic of contrasts could apply to the introduction of stock stereotypical characters in drama: they signify a symbolic, unreal element by emphasizing their own conventionality. The increased conventionality of a stage set or a character or a frame or a background embodies, as it were, frames within the frame, showing us how we are in a different space. They draw our attention to the register of artificiality.
Doesn't this provide a clue to understanding what needs to happen to stop the mourning process going on for ever? In Freud's account, after all, what is there to indicate that we are no longer haunted by the one we've lost? The Austrian psychoanalyst Franz Kaltenbeck has suggested that perhaps all the representations of the lost object must be gathered up into a set: they must pass from being representations to another level. This transformation implies that the representations must be framed: they must be represented as representations. It is no longer a question of the image we think we see in the street, the tone of voice we think we hear in a crowded room, the presence we expect momentarily when the phone or the doorbell rings. Rather, we come to give certain representations the value of representing all these others.
Mourning thus is about much more than real biological death. It is also about laying someone to rest symbolically. When someone dies, we often behave as if they are not entirely dead. We talk in whispers around a coffin, and are careful not to malign the dead with malevolent or disrespectful remarks. The burial rites studied by anthropologists show the same precaution: every measure must. be taken to ensure that the dead don't return to take vengeance on us. Heavy coffin lids or stones tied to the body, the breaking of leg bones to keep them immobile, charms and amulets to deter their attacks, and a whole 'range of sacrifices and tokens have this palliative, protective function.
Precious objects are often buried with the dead to make sure they are kept happy and distracted, and the custom of binding the limbs of cadavers, once understood as a sign of ritual murder, is now seen as a measure most probably taken to ensure that they don't return. Burying possessions is less a mark of devotion and respect than a warding-off. Many cultures require that the body of the deceased does not leave the house it died in through the main door, as this would allow it to return. It must leave through a specially built hole in the wall, which is then swiftly resealed. In some rites, mourners run in a zigzag pattern away from the grave so as to dodge the ghost of the departed. Anecdotal evidence has it that some indigenous cultures saw the arrival of white men as the return of the dead, because they seemed so eager to kill people and cause harm.
At the same time, our culture is full of stories, books and films about the dead never quite dying, from the ever-popular cycle of zombie movies to the endless tales of ghouls and vampires. This animism ascribed to the dead is yet one more sign that at some level we believe that the dead are always just about to come back. To stop this, the undead need to die, and besides the figure of the greedy blood-sucking vampire it is significant that we also find the sad, world-weary vampire who longs to be properly put to rest.
The anthropologist Robert Hertz documented the discrepancy between mourning and burial rites. Many people’s employ rituals which address this separation, having a second burial ceremony when it is judged that the deceased has reached their true destination and is finally at rest. Greek tragedy is full of references to the fact that biological and symbolic death do not always coincide. For symbolic death to occur, the dead must be banished and kept at bay. They must take up a place in the world of their ancestors, or, in a more general sense, in the world of the dead. Some peoples will draw a circle around the dead to contain them, and implore ancestors to accept them, to keep them there. The dead become relocated and assigned a new role and function within the social group.
We find the same split in the Christian tradition. The standard idea that the soul leaves the body at death to reside in the spiritual realms of heaven, hell or purgatory where it will await the Last Judgment proved intolerable to many thinkers as it left so many unanswered questions. What was asleep and what was really dead? Was there a difference between extinction and a temporal pause in existence? Could the soul experience a syncope?
The distinction between real and symbolic death is perhaps confused for us today by the fact that so often the order seems reversed. Rather than biological death preceding symbolic death, it is as if the symbolic death comes first.
In African or Asian cultures the key is that the dead are installed in the ancestral line. The social group registers the disappearance of ancestor who died. After mourning and burial rites, social structures change, and formal rules govern the relation of the new set of ancestors to their descendants. The dead are not present via communication with the living, but by a reordering of the social group.
When Europeans and Americans speak casually about the childish belief in ghosts and communication with the dead in indigenous cultures, they are in fact talking about their own culture. It is us and not them who cannot separate from the dead.
The historian Jean-Claude Schmitt showed in his book about ghosts in the Middle Ages how they would always return to plead for masses, almsgiving or prayer so as to improve their situation in the hereafter. They needed to be released and laid to rest symbolically, but the circumstances of their death prevented this. Failure of suffrages, not having carried out penance before dying, or, later, the non-baptism of a child would result in these states of suspension. If the usual rites of mourning had not been completed, the dead would suffer and make themselves visible to' the living. Given this context, they would appear at different times, linked to liturgical details, date of death, and the calendar of feast days. People in the Middle Ages, perhaps, were more alert to anniversary reactions than we are today. When things went wrong, they would look to their calendars in a way that perhaps only the superstitious do today.
The dead here always wanted something from the living. Interestingly, medieval religious texts gave exactly the same advice to those burdened by ghosts as do today's psychotherapists. When the terrifying apparition would make its entrance, the deceased's family were advised to ask it what it wanted. Since ghosts were always ghosts for a reason - with something left unpaid or some spiritual debt left in the balance the only way to get rid of them properly would be to find out what exactly the problem was and then try to solve it. Today, when a child complains of nocturnal visitations by ghosts and ghouls, the psychologically minded clinician might well do the same thing. Often, the child is quite surprised to be asked what they think the ghost wants, and this question can be useful in changing the way that he or she pictures the situation.
The third element of mourning concerns its object. This might seem obvious: we mourn the one we have lost. But neither Freud nor Klein nor Lacan saw this as a given. Freud observed in Mourning and Melancholia that there may be a difference between whom we have lost and what we have lost in them. This beautiful and sensitive differentiation suggests that perhaps mourning can only progress precisely when we have been able to separate out these two dimensions for ourselves.
Take the controversy over mourning in childhood. Can a two-year-old who loses a parent be said to mourn the loss? It has often been observed that young children who have lost a parent might continue with their everyday activities, with no weeping or withdrawal into preoccupation. It has also struck many researchers how these children sometimes seemed to be in very good moods. Feeling good, after all, is the affective version of denial: if we don't feel bad, then nothing bad has happened. Only much later, in their teens or twenties, would grief hit them, yet usually without any conscious connection with the original loss. A romantic break-up or another death within their circle of friends or family would ignite the grief that had been blocked in childhood. Such processes, which have been well documented, pose the question of whether a young child is able to mourn in the way that an adult does.
Some researchers believe that children cannot mourn, since they have not yet acquired a true concept of death, yet we could ask whether adults have been any more successful. Similarly, we can certainly find many bereaved adults who show no signs of grief or mourning. After a loss, they continue with their lives as if not much has happened; they show up at work as usual, they continue with their hobbies and interests, and avoid speaking about what has taken place. If children cannot mourn, would these adults just be children who have never grown up? Or do they share some defense mechanism or deficit which we could define and explain?
Opinions about childhood mourning remain divided. Some say that mourning does indeed take place, pointing out that we may not notice the subtle ways in which children mourn. Others argue that at such a young age the child will not have formed an adequate idea of the lost loved one to allow true grief They can't be said to mourn an object until they actually have an idea of what an object - or a person is. This rather simple point suggests that perhaps mourning is only possible once we have been able to constitute for ourselves an idea of what an object - or a person - is. It is less a question of having an adequate view of death than of having an adequate view of a person: and this, perhaps, already includes within it a conception of loss.
This might explain the once popular idea that mourning can only take place after adolescence. Although clinically this is incorrect, the logic behind it is illuminating. Adolescence, we are told, is the time when we mourn our parents: we give up our attachments to them. This painful time is like a 'trial mourning', an initiation into the process of dealing with loss. When we later on experience a loss through separation or bereavement, we can relate it to what we went through in adolescence. The interest of this idea is that it suggests that one loss must be put in relation to another, earlier loss. We can only mourn if we have already lost something.
Mourning, Lacan thought, is not about giving up an object but about restoring one's links to an object as lost, as impossible. Yet the key here is to distinguish the object from the narcissistic envelope that covers it, the details of the human image that our love has been drawn to. If the links to the object are restored, and the place of the imaginary envelope separated from this, it may become possible for another to take its place.
We are, in some senses, the one we mourn, and that our love for them was also a love of ourselves. They are part of us. Wouldn't this explain the peculiar phenomenon sometimes found in children who have experienced the loss of a parent: rather than immediate sadness or anger, they feel ashamed. If the parent was in fact a part of themselves, as Martha Wolfenstein pointed out, losing them means losing an inalienable possession.
Then in the case of adults, there is also anticipatory grief as the feelings experienced by those waiting for someone to die. Knowing their loved one is dying, they start the mourning process before the actual death. And is often heard from those who care for those suffering from Alzheimer's. They were no longer themselves, and this absence was mourned before the moment of biological death itself But is this really the essence of anticipatory grief?
It could be argued that anticipatory grief is in fact a phenomenon that occurs when the one we are mourning is very far from death. We can find it at those moments when a child realizes that the loved parent will not be there one day. This troubling realization may make a child both sad and furious at the parent.
Thus the result of anticipatory grief is the painful realization that the object already contains the possibility of its non-existence. A nothingness is created. And isn't this exactly what we saw in the debate about childhood mourning? Loss can only be mourned, we are told, when we have an idea of a person - but doesn't the very idea of a person contain the idea of that person's absence? The child must confront this awful specter, which may be elaborated in the later form of a terror of ghosts and the supernatural. Even before the loved one is gone, the ghost of their disappearance is set into place. We can observe this phenomenon in adulthood when someone falls in love. They may suddenly become devastated at the idea that their partner will no longer be there one day, even if at the time they are perfectly present and manifestly devoted.
Anticipatory grief can occur quite late in life. Sometimes a person who has had several lengthy relationships will experience it after decades of feeling no similar sentiment. And it can occur quite frequently in relation to parents. An adult will start to distance him- or herself from an ageing parent, sometimes not being fully aware of this. What seems to be a sign of lack of interest or neglect may in fact conceal quite the opposite: they withdraw as if to somehow preserve the parent, to keep them always there, the same forever. That way they avoid the inevitable failings of the parent's il11ige through age and ill-health.
The fourth element of the mourning process concerns who it is we are mourning for. We might take it for granted that when we mourn, we are mourning the one we've lost. We think of them, we see their image, we hear their voice, and they are present to us in so many painful and poignant ways. While this is certainly the case, we may also be mourning something else.
A woman mourning the death of her mother spoke of a feeling that kept returning to her, despite her unease at its apparent triviality. Although she was immersed in images and thoughts of her mother and her illness, these would repeatedly converge on one simple moment: when her mother would use a nickname for her, 'Sparrow'. 'I realized,' she said, 'that no one would ever call me that again.' This special designation was only used by her mother, and it was this that kept returning, rather than, as one might have expected, her own nickname for the mother. What haunted her was not just the image of her mother but the privileged point at which her own image was composed for the Other.
We spend our lives, after all, actively caught up in relationships. When we love other people, we have a place in the relationships we forge with them. Just as we give them a place, so the very fabric of our relationship to them accords us a place. It gives us a certain identity, as a child to be loved, to be mistreated, to be listened to, ignored or whatever image has been given a special value in our unconscious mental life. We create relationships in part in order to secure imaginary positions for ourselves. The function of a relationship is, in part, to maintain this position: it situates us as an image in relation to the gaze of someone else.
After several years of agonizing grief following the separation from her beloved partner, a woman began a new relationship. She had never imagined meeting a man she could care for again, and her feelings of attraction to the new boyfriend both troubled and confused her. She realized that she was in completely new territory, since she did not know, as she put it, 'who I am' outside the relationship with her previous love. Even after their separation, she had continued life as if they were together, defining herself in relation to him and seeing herself through his eyes. Finding words to describe the new relationship was almost impossible for her: 'It's like an empty space,' she said. It was soon after this encounter with the new man that she decided to visit a far-flung region of the world, known for its barren geography, as if she had to literally inhabit an empty space before she could start to make sense of what she was feeling. Relationships give us places and when they end we have to decide whether we can give up these places or not.