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If we can say of most people that they have memories, so too they have futures.
And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire.
In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud writes of mourning as the means of overcoming one's attachment to what has been lost. It is painstaking work, “an exhaustion of representations” (Leader, 2008, p. 101) through which the ego disinvests the lost object in anticipation of future cathexes. It is a rescue operation, a retrieval of the ego from its pursuit of the lost object. But, however novel and useful Freud's paper remains, its treatment of mourning carries with it a certain coldness. Even though mourning is for him an act of preservation, its description is mechanistic and at times borders on violence. For example, having “abolished” the lost object, the ego must decide “whether it shall share this fate” (Freud, p. 254); if successful, the ego “severs its attachment” (p. 254) to the object and “becomes free and uninhibited again” (p. 244). One almost pities the object, so ruthlessly must it be abandoned — but it is dead weight; it pulls down upon the ego, and all attachments to it must be, as Freud writes, severed. Here, mourning is purging, and, as purging, its function is essentially negative.
Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016) offers a different version of mourning. Its concern is not with the freeing of an ego from its lost object, but with the movement of a person from solitude to attachment. There are moments in the film in which Freud's concept of mourning is nearly reversed. Mourning takes on a creative function, becoming in itself generative, a preparation for the act of loving it announces. I will try to make clear this transformation using