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As Peter Homans (1989) develops Freud's theory of mourning into a theory of culture in The Ability to Mourn, he relates both its emergence and its structure to the processes of individuation and secularization in the modern West. He states:
Individuation has two components, return and release. In the first, there is the loss of symbols or meaningful structures, the response to which is mourning; in the second, a movement forward into consequent structure building and the creation of meaning, of new structures of appreciation. The response to loss opens up this transitional space, which is both social and historical, and in the space persons construct a bridge of symbols between inner and social worlds through fantasy activity and its implicitly narrative character. (333)
I suggest that this understanding of the individual response to cultural change is not simply a theory applicable to the loss of an over-arching religious worldview in recent centuries in Europe and America, but a general theory of the loss of traditional culture, grounded in the stronger aspects of psychoanalytic theory concerning attachment, loss, and the permanence of memory, and subsequently smoothed out and enriched by object-relations psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Specifically, I anticipate that the approach to the individual and to culture through the psychoanalytic notion of object loss will be extremely fruitful in the clarification of the subjective experience and symbolism represented in the Book of Ezekiel.
Assuming the facts offered in locating this prophet in a setting—his priestly lineage, his exile in Babylon—to correspond to the situation of the original visionary to some appreciable degree, one must recognize Ezekiel's existence as