Both melancholia and mourning are triggered by the same thing, that is, by loss. The distinction often made is that mourning occurs after the death of a loved one while in melancholia the object of love does not qualify as irretrievably lost.
These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud's extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist's naïve pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.
This book draws on a number of Freud's lesser-known works to explore psychoanalytic perspectives on memory, mourning and repetition. It is remarkable that Freud in his speculations on the human psyche often took his point of departure in an insignificant detail. It might be a lapse of memory or a detail in a piece of art. From here he uncovered the many layers of the psyche, its complex structure and the processing of meaning right to the limit of understanding. At this point Freud ́s exploration encountered the unknown, an internal outland as difficult to acknowledge as the external reality. Freud did not invent the unconscious but he demonstrated how it works. The unconscious according to Freud does not exist, but insists on making itself visible. The eleven essays in this book draw a picture of the critical humanistic thinking so characteristic of Freud. His concepts and suppositions were the result of many years’ speculations, based on observation, experience and ideas, and although they are marked by the time and culture from which they emerged, they demonstrate a revolutionary knowledge of the psyche transcending the knowledge of his time. In her reading of the chosen texts the author has chosen the position of a contemporary interpretation. Examining how psychoanalytic work on the topics of memory, mourning and repetition has changed since Freud and how these themes remain of crucial importance in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, this book intersperses theory with clinical practice. It will be of great interest to training and practicing psychoanalysts, as well as scholars of art, literature and sociology.
Mourning Freud analyses Freud's experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century. The modernist Freud of the early 20th century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the 21st. Madelon Sprengnether examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud's self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience concerning the unreliability of memory. She offers a significant interpretation of major biographical episodes in Freud's life, arguing that Freud's inability to mourn the losses of his early life shaped his theories of mourning, which in turn opened the field of pre-oedipal studies to his successors, enabling a host of new psychoanalytic theories such as object relations, intersubjective and countertransference theories, Lacanian analysis, and trauma theory. Many of these approaches converge on the formulation of mourning as critical to the process of ego development. Through this argument, Sprengnether traces the shift from modernism to postmodernism-from an emphasis on mastery to vulnerability, from vertical to horizontal systems of meaning-making, and from what is representable in words to the realm of the nonverbal. Mourning Freud, by exploring Freud's own struggles with mourning, allows us, in turn, to mourn him-releasing him from frozen idealization while demonstrating the relevance of his work to the 21st century.
Mourning Freud analyses Freud's experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century. The modernist Freud of the early 20th century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the 21st. Madelon Sprengnether examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud's self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience concerning the unreliability of memory. She offers a significant interpretation of major biographical episodes in Freud's life, arguing that Freud's inability to mourn the losses of his early life shaped his theories of mourning, which in turn opened the field of pre-oedipal studies to his successors, enabling a host of new psychoanalytic theories such as object relations, intersubjective and countertransference theories, Lacanian analysis, and trauma theory. Many of these approaches converge on the formulation of mourning as critical to the process of ego development. Through this argument, Sprengnether traces the shift from modernism to postmodernism-from an emphasis on mastery to vulnerability, from vertical to horizontal systems of meaning-making, and from what is representable in words to the realm of the nonverbal. Mourning Freud, by exploring Freud's own struggles with mourning, allows us, in turn, to mourn him-releasing him from frozen idealization while demonstrating the relevance of his work to the 21st century.
Times of Mourning: Bereavement, Clinical Challenge, and Subjectivity works around the homonymous property of the word duelo in Spanish, which means both grief and duel. Adriana Bauab argues that the mourning process is a challenge and an opportunity for the subject to recompose their symbolic universe, recovering the function of lack that can ignite desire. Citing multiple clinical examples, Bauab proposes new tools for the treatment of grief.
Jacques Derrida famously stated in Specters of Marx that a justice worthy of the name must call us to render justice not only to the living but also to the dead. In The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning, Timothy Secret argues that offering a persuasive account of such a duty requires establishing a discussion among the 20th century's three key thinkers on death – Heidegger, Levinas and Freud. Despite arguing that none of these three figures' discourses offers us a complete account of our duty to the dead and that it remains impossible to unify them into a single, consistent and correct approach, Secret nevertheless offers an account of how Derrida managed to produce an always singular articulation of these discourses in each of the acts of eulogy he offered for his philosophical contemporaries. This is one of the first monographs to pay particular attention to the key role any contemporary account of the ethics of eulogy must grant to the revolutionary theoretical work on the materiality of crypts and phantoms offered by the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Their work is shown to supplement major limitations in traditional philosophical accounts of the ethical relation. The account of eulogy as a privileged space where different discourses act on each other under the pressure of responding responsibly to an always singular loss proves itself essential reading not only for those interested in understanding Derrida's overtly political works, but also offers an account of a performative training in negotiating aporias that arise in political society – the result of which is a pedagogy in the art of civility whose relevance today is more timely than ever.
This book traces the concept of melancholy in Walter Benjamin's early writings. Rather than focusing on the overtly melancholic subject matter of Benjamin's work or the unhappy circumstances of his own fate, Ferber considers the concept's implications for his philosophy. Informed by Heidegger's discussion of moods and their importance for philosophical thought, she contends that a melancholic mood is the organizing principle or structure of Benjamin's early metaphysics and ontology. Her novel analysis of Benjamin's arguments about theater and language features a discussion of the Trauerspiel book that is amongst the first in English to scrutinize the baroque plays themselves. Philosophy and Melancholy also contributes to the history of philosophy by establishing a strong relationship between Benjamin and other philosophers, including Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger.
The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace. The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust, and Freud's successor Lacan. Freud's idea of "sorrow work" and Proust's concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.