Resurrection and Murder: An Analysis of Mourning (in memory of my father)

It is curious that Freudian psychoanalysis, a discipline dedicated to explicating the often-overlooked features of psychic and social life, has yet to formulate an extensive theory of mourning. This oversight not surprisingly derives from Freud, who generally deemphasizes the topic of death in favor of other psychic processes to such a degree that some theorists—Jacques Lacan, for one, and his follower Stuart Schneiderman, for another—have come close to calling it a repression.

In his only direct treatment of the subject, “Mourning and Melancholia” , Freud pronounces mourning a transparent process, in spite of recognizing the difficulty of explaining it “in terms of economics” and confessing surprise that its “painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us” (245). Freud adopts common-sense assumptions about mourning, burying his own troubling observations about it, in order to progress to his favored topic, melancholia. Helene Deutsch (1937) summarizes Freud's concept of mourning as a “normal function of bereaved individuals, by which the libido invested in the lost love-object is gradually withdrawn and redirected toward living people and problems” (12). Considering mourning a “normal” operation (not pathological), Freud dismisses it, but mourning is not “normal” insofar as it is not carried out regularly or constantly by most people and signals a departure from everyday functioning. In psychoanalytic studies (such as Deutsch's on the incapacity to grieve, or Freud's on its success) and in standard books of advice on grief, there recur two central themes: pain and anger. It remains for us to determine what precisely there is about a “dead” person that produces such rage; what in mourning that induces such pain.