War and Grief

Today, we may be facing that same crisis, a different kind of sudden death. I feel both too old, at thirty-four, and not old enough to see history repeat itself.

Grief can be a strange thing, particularly when it is associated with mourning. Psychoanalysis in some sense was born out of grief. Freud first mentioned the death of his own father, a powerful figure, in The Interpretation of Dreams. The death of Jacob Freud in 1896 prompted Freud, as a result of his own self-analysis of the matter, to write Die Traumdeutung in 1899. A significant portion of Freud's self-analysis was addressed in letters to his colleague Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, such as the following:

The old man's death has affected me deeply. I valued him highly, understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic light-heartedness he had a significant effect on my life…in my inner self the whole past has been awakened by this event. I now feel quite uprooted. (Freud 1986, 202)

Freud would later refer to the death of Jacob as vital in his own self-analysis: “It was a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death—that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss of a man's life.” (Freud 2010, xxvi) This, the death of a loved one, is something I've found to be true, both in my own analysis, and have observed in my own clinic: a clinic of grief and mourning.

My own Lacanian analysis began shortly after the sudden death of my father, and I think that analysis perhaps couldn't have begun without it, as his death began to uproot me in the many identifications I had held on to, a process psychoanalysis would hasten. It is no small irony that I work as a grief counselor, working primarily with parents who have suddenly or unexpectedly lost their children, the other side of what brought me into psychoanalysis. And I remember how proud my father was that I served in the navy, but I wasn't able to say what I say now when he was a