Diana's Subjects

Millions of people felt themselves being swept along by a tide of emotion following Diana's death—as if this were a collective process of shock, grief and mourning as much as an individual response, and as if those intertwined individual and collective feelings were always there, waiting to be released at a moment like this. They were not. But we live in a culture which is psychologically structured so that events of this kind evoke certain kinds of feelings about who we are and what our relationship with others is like, and then we feel them with such intensity that we imagine that they must be very deep, and necessarily true.

Rather than reveal some deep underlying psychological nature, however, they express the ways in which we have come to function as psychological beings—and, in particular, the way we absorb and display themes of unconscious emotions as subjects of a psychoanalytic culture. The week between the death and the funeral saw people represent themselves as psychoanalytic selves, and so it is worth reflecting on how this was accomplished so that we do not make the mistake of reading these events as simply confirming psychoanalysis as universally true. We might then also understand better what is really going on.

One of the powerful psychoanalytic motifs of that fraught week was that of a rising crescendo of feeling, and a sense that people were experiencing something overwhelming and barely comprehensible. Some of the descriptions of emotion in the gathering crowds in newspapers and on television could have been written by Freud to illustrate his account of mass psychology and the analysis of the ego.

Media descriptions of the crowds talked of their “disbelief” that it was possible that Diana was really dead, and the difficulty they would have in coming to terms with “the great loss.” Coming and “gathering together” was a way of showing that they were “a nation united in sorrow.” How can we make sense of this?

One of the ways psychoanalysis functions in t