CONCLUSIONES

In the last chapter we saw the various ways in which cognitive disciplines have only lately begun to engage with aspects of death and dying, albeit in ways which privilege the public realm (as the primary locus of social value), at the expense of human interiority and the psychic dimensions of intra-personal experience invoked by loss of various kinds. In this chapter I explore approaches which take the unconscious dynamics of loss, albeit, of various kinds and not just those occasioned by death, as their principal starting point.1 _At

the same time, and following the insights offered by Freudian psychoanalysis, I suggest that any consideration of the emotional responses attending loss, especially death, are incomplete without a corresponding analysis of the psychic processes of identity formation through which selfhood is brokered.

In the last chapter I began to point to psychoanalytic approaches which extend consideration of the emotional responses that typically ensue from the death of a loved-one, to the consideration of emotional responses that flow from loss in general. In so doing I wish to broaden my argument to suggest that the identificatory processes that precede loss, whether occasioned by actual death or physical disappearance, are central to an understanding of the psychic ‘negotiation’ (as well as its outward manifestation and sublimation) by which the

1_{Prior (1989) provides an inversion of my argument here by suggesting that it is psychoanalysis (and psychology more}

generally) which has underprivileged the social aspects of death and mourning by a disproportionate concentration upon grief as seen as unfolding internally within the human psyche.

individual seeks to reconcile and resurrect these losses. It is precisely these unconscious and interior dynamics — and the subsequent attempts to withdraw the investments of meaning made in various love objects — and not just their outward manifestation (as is characteristic of the literatures reviewed in chapter 1 of the thesis), that Freud (1917) calls ‘mourning’, which I will presently engage with here.

Following Freud’s (1917) seminal contribution to the study of mourning in Mourning and

Melancholia, it is my contention that one cannot study mourning adequately in isolation of

the wider identificatory practices that are its sufficient and necessary condition. It is, moreover, my intention in this chapter, to engage critically with various psychoanalytic literatures and approaches that have long endeavoured to theorise aspects of human life as constituted within the terrain of human interiority. It is these issues, chiefly, of self, society and subjectivity (and the interconnections between them) that have, until recently, and with the exception of a growing, yet relatively marginal, corpus of literature within contemporary sociology2 remained conspicuously absent from sociological consideration. It is especially

these issues: the taking-in of the social and cultural world, its phastasmatic transformation in the realm of interiority, and subsequent attempts to mourn various losses encountered throughout a lifetime that have been occluded from analyses of ‘cognitively’ focused approaches to death. That is to say, amongst approaches within the field of death studies which one might readily assume would be equipped to apprehend the sorts of questions which I ask in this thesis.

2 _{See, for example, Burkitt, 1993; Craib, 1998; Giddens, 1991, 1992; Jamieson, 1998; Levine, 1992; Rustin, 1991;}

That sociology, as traditionally constituted, has been unable to focus upon these issues — issues, as I have earlier suggested, of ways in which aspects of culture and society are internalised and invoked by episodes of public mourning of the kind considered here — in turn initiates the necessity to look beyond literatures contained within sociology (and the sociology of death, dying and bereavement as its extra-disciplinary area of special interest) as a measure of explicating a range of issues central to my thesis. This in turn forces us to concede the limitations of a singular disciplinary or unilateral approach to the study of public mourning. Whilst death studies is multi-disciplinary, the disciplines which constitute it remain steadfastly cognitive in orientation, each with relatively impermeable boundaries. Smelser (1999) usefully suggests in this regard that the acceleration of academic specialisation through the more rigid disciplinisation of particular fields of study has inevitably been paid for at the cost of greater general knowledge about society as a whole. The flip side of greater academic expertise, especially the intensification of intra- disciplinary specialisation, is that we come to know only singularised fragments of social life, and at its most extreme, remain isolated from the wider concerns of the disciplines in which our knowledge is concentrated. It is for this reason, as I outlined in the introduction to the thesis, that public mourning of the sort considered here be explored from a range of disciplinary vantage points, namely, sociological, psychoanalytic and ‘culturalist’, which, taken together, usefully help elaborate the imbrication of aspects of self, society and subjectivity.

Whilst modernity has seen the narrowing of intellectual horizons through greater academic disciplinisation (Heilbron, 1995), in postmodernity we are seeing the steady demolition of

disciplinary walls which, since the late eighteenth century, have served to limit the scope of academic thinking by confining it to a ‘received’ wisdom of established academic and disciplinary practice. Johan Heilbron (1995) has traced the trajectory towards ‘disciplinisation’ within European seats of learning from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Here, Heilbron suggests that learned societies and literary salons gave way to more formal and disciplinary organisation within reformed universities and newly created professional schools and research centres. It is these, which emerged during the late eighteenth century –– and which as the word discipline suggests –– became more constraining arrangements, weakening the possibility of intellectual ‘exchanges’ between academic disciplines (see also, for example, Wittrocket al, 1997).

If therefore the pre-modern period was a pre-disciplinary stage of academic development, and modernity saw the incarnation of academic disciplines as we know them today, then the postmodern –– with its free-flow of information and ideas –– offers an opportunity for greater interdisciplinarity. Here I want to suggest that we further accelerate the loosening of disciplinary boundaries which at present serve to restrict the flow of knowledge of particular areas of human life to particular disciplines so as to encourage ‘exchanges’ between disciplines, say, sociology and psychoanalysis, which, as Craib (1995: 151) points out, ‘know practically nothing of each other’. Suffice it to say, that a measure of the untenability of such rigid compartmentalisation of knowledge about human life, and the study thereof, is that human life itself, by its very nature, defies such categorisation. Human life, and the various aspects which constitute it, are, in short, plural, at times arbitrarily interrelated, and above all messy. It demands therefore, in my view, a commensurate inter-

disciplinary approach which, whilst careful not to lose sight of the specialist knowledges which are the hallmark (and, in part, strength) of academic disciplines, draws upon a wide variety of knowledges and practices (both academic and informal, local and global) which are often competing and mutually opposed. The study of aspects of human life in postmodern conditions demands therefore an approach which is multiperspectival (Kellner, 1997).

By way of a brief detour and before engaging more fully with Freud’s conceptualisation of mourning as a psychological condition preceded, first, by processes through which the ego selects an object of identification for ‘introjective’ incorporation within the self, and second, the ‘instinctive’ and unconscious responses of the subject to the loss of a beloved, I begin this chapter by situating Freud’s ‘scandalous’ project of psychoanalysis against the backdrop of prevailing Cartesian assumptions about the self. I continue by discussing Freud’s iconoclastic engagement with the heavily interdicted topic of death before eventually discussing the complex dynamics linking loss, identity formation and the work of mourning: as the gradual process by which the ego seeks to disinvest or ‘de-cathect’ the lost object ‘of the intensity of all memories, impulses and libidinal investments associated with it’ (Grosz, 1990: 30). Here I critically review classical theories of mourning from Freud, through the work of Melanie Klein and a ‘second generation’ of psychoanalysts, to the work of Julia Kristeva. Along the way I discuss various criticisms which have been levelled at Freudian psychoanalysis, especially from feminists, but also from critics who have accused psychoanalysis of pathologising, and sequestering, aspects of everyday human life within medical discourse. I conclude this chapter — and provide the basis for the next

— by discussing the ways in which, in psychoanalytic theory, loss (of loved ones, selves and pasts) is central to ways in which the individual establishes a relation to the self and other people. In this way, and in contrast to ordinary common senses on the subject, psychoanalysis reverses the emphasis on the loss occasioned by biological death, focusing instead upon the child’s first separation from mother, as the most lasting and grievous of losses. Here I begin to suggest, following the work of Julia Kristeva (1984, 1989) and Anthony Elliott (1996, 1999) that mourning and loss are central to the creative imagination and the ways in which the pathos of loss is encrypted within contemporary cultural forms.

The Scandal of Reason: Freud’s Copernican Revolution

Freud was arguably among the first academics, and was certainly the first modern psychologist, to engage with human passions (of love, hate, greed, jealousy, regret) as an object worthy of scientific inquiry. Until then, save for the contributions of Greek philosophers, Buddhist sages and medieval and modern ‘psychologists’ up to the time of Spinoza (Fromm, 1997), this had been largely the preserve of novelists and dramatists. Where Freud differed in his engagement with issues, broadly constituted, of the soul — a subject which artists had until this point considered their own — was in his fledgling attempts to systematically ground his explorations through the use of modern techniques which aimed at subjecting the study of man’s [sic] innermost desires and passions to

thoroughgoing analytical and scientific consideration.3 Freud was the progenitor of a

discipline which, for the first time, sought the conscious investigation of that which, for

3_{Following Jessica Benjamin’s comments (1990: 13–14), in which she suggests that there is no ‘graceful solution’ to the}

problem of the use of gender pronouns, I have — where I think it is unavoidable and where the use either of feminine or gender neutral pronouns risk’s adding confusion to already complex psychoanalytic theories — retained the original, gender specific, use of masculine pronouns as employed by early psychoanalytic theorists throughout this chapter.

most part, remains unconscious. Freud’s wider project to explore the basis of human

subjectivity extends the classical Greek injunction to ‘know thyself’ but deviates markedly from later Western Cartesian conceptions of the individual — which became widespread during the Enlightenment — as stable, ‘uncontested’, and as governed by rational forces alone. The very basis of man’s [sic] subjectivity, according to Freud, lay in the uncharted

waters of the unconscious mind. The task of psychoanalysis has been to raise to the level of conscious analysis the sometimes painful and often unpalatable ‘truths’ hitherto sunk in the depths of the unconscious.

Freud’s revolution in thinking, like all revolutions, political or otherwise, was met with resistance from various quarters, not least from those with an interest in maintaining Western philosophical conceptions of the individual asHomo clausus. That is to say, a view

of the individual which became prevalent in Western societies during the early modern period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as possessing a ‘mind’ which is experienced as separate from his or her body and from other individuals in society (Elias, 1978: 119ff). To concede that there might be — to use prevailing colonialist discourse of the early twentieth century when Freud was writing — a previously undiscovered, dark and dangerous continent of the unconscious mind, replete with savage impulses which threatened to overwhelm the rationally acting agent, was to admit to the personal ‘ownership’ of destructive or ambivalent impulses, phantasies4 and desires that had

4_{Rycroft (1995) notes that despite phonetic and etymological similarities between the words ‘fantasy’ and ‘phantasy’,}

they tend to be apprehended separately. ‘Fantasy’, in theOxford English Dictionary, according to Rycroft (1995: 55–6), connotes ‘caprice, whim, fanciful invention’ whilst ‘phantasy’ is used principally to connote ‘imagination, visionary notion’. Since the psychoanalytic use of the term has been deployed less to signify whimsical speculation than it has to represent the specular and dream-like quality of the unconscious imagination, psychoanalytic theorists (especially British, but less so American) have preferred phantasy over ‘fantasy’. King and Steiner (1991) further usefully write that

seemingly been tamed by ‘civilisation’ and which Western man [sic] had ostensibly brought

under effective control.

Whilst Freud could not perhaps have been expected to anticipate the degree of hostility with which his ideas were first met (for his ‘hereticism’ in daring to challenge Cartesian assumptions about the self), it is clear that Freud did anticipate the internal energy of resistance by which the ego would seek to repel attempts to make conscious that which would otherwise remain unconscious (Fromm, 1997). It is possible to conceive the various objections raised against Freud’s thinking as analogous to the ways in which Freud suggests the unconscious seeks to defend itself against attempts to raise it to the level of consciousness. Objections to Freud’s iconoclasm came thick and fast, from various quarters of established bastions of rational modernist thinking, including their political tributaries,5

but perhaps with the notable exception of artists, for whom Freud’s work had the greatest resonance and reception. Various parallels have of course long been drawn between Freud’s pioneering analysis of the unconscious, especially his blueprint for the interpretation of dreams, and the representational art of the Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century.

Freud’s ideas challenging prevailing Cartesian assumptions about the individual have continued to pose serious implications for sociology and the social sciences in general,

differences in the spelling of the word ‘phantasy’ relate to differences between conscious and unconscious varieties in the usage of the term. Unconscious phantasy, since its translation from the German wordphantasie, is routinely spelled with ‘ph’, whereas the use of ‘fantasy’ in psychoanalytic theory is used to refer to conscious phantasy as day-dreaming or wishful thinking. For further discussion of the concept of phantasy within psychoanalytic theory and its application to works of literary fiction, see Britton (1998). Throughout this chapter, and in keeping with the strict psychoanalytic usage, I use ‘phantasy’. Elsewhere throughout the thesis I revert to ‘fantasy’.

5 _{Macey (1994) reports that in 1949 the French Communist Party issued a pamphlet (La Nouvelle Critique, La} Psychanalyse, idéologie réactionnaire’), in which they denounced psychoanalysis as a ‘reactionary ideology’.

which have traditionally been premised upon corresponding philosophical notions of the self. That sociology has traditionally, if implicitly, operated with such philosophical premises, in which identity is assigned to the individual by the external social world in which s/he finds themselves existing, can be evidenced from objections raised against its ‘over socialised’ conception of the individual (Wrong, 1967). Whilst such criticisms were levelled chiefly at normative, especially Parsonian sociology, as a paradigm of the discipline that dominated North American (and to a lesser extent British) sociology during the 1950s, I nevertheless sought to demonstrate in the last chapter the continued purchase that such normative (and socially reductionist) assumptions about the individual have continued to have within aspects of contemporary sociology in each of these national contexts. Arguably, the greatest contribution of psychoanalysis in this respect has been to challenge such assumptions; problematising taken-for-granted notions of the self. Anthony Elliott (1994: 6) neatly summarises the psychoanalytic position on selfhood by suggesting that ‘the self is shown to be a dimension of subjectivity which is made in fantastic form, constituted through the unconscious operations of desire itself’. Psychoanalysis, he writes

posits a basic split at the centre of psychical life between

consciousness of selfand that which isunconscious. Lurking behind all forms of self organization — that is, our day-to-day fashionings of self- identity — there lies a ‘hidden self’, a dimension of subjectivity which produces itself through fantasy, drives, and passions. . . this hidden self, however we may choose to act or express ourselves, constantly disrupts and outstrips us through displacing and condensing our conscious experience and knowledge. . . And it is precisely at this point, the splitting off of conscious intention and unconscious desire, that psychoanalytic theory installs itself, seeking to uncover repressed or overdetermined aspects of self-organization.

Psychoanalysis therefore makes a direct challenge to conflations of consciousness with subjectivity. Deploying a Lacanian reading of Freud, Elizabeth Grosz (1990), unlike others who have elsewhere suggested that Freud was one of the last representatives of Enlightenment philosophy (e.g. Fromm, 1997) because of a genuine belief in reason as the one thing which could save man [sic] from his own destructive impulses, has suggested that

Freud’s thinking challenges the very precepts upon which rationalist claims to knowledge have been built.6 Nevertheless, Erich Fromm (1955, 1997) has arguably been at the

forefront of attempts to rearticulate psychoanalysis in more socially inflected terms (see also, for example, Benjamin, 1990; Chodorow, 1978, 1989; Mitchell, 1974) and has done so in a way consistent with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (of which he was a part), whose enduring legacy has been the stress it has laid on the emancipatory potential of reason, against its subversion by the prevailing ‘technical rationality’ and mass culture of Western capitalist societies.

Grosz on the other hand has further suggested that Freud’s thinking provides the basis for post-structuralist and postmodern assumptions (especially as later manifested in the deconstructivist work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) about the self: as multiple, contingent and unable to ever truly ‘know’ itself. Grosz goes on to suggest that Freud’s work on the unconsciousness should be considered alongside other intellectual works produced during the fin de siècle upheavals experienced by nineteenth century European

6_{Fromm, like other post-war ‘humanistic’ neo-Freudians (for example, Erik Erikson, 1963; Karen Horney, 1966) has}

endeavoured to distinguish Freud’s thinking from the biologism of early ‘instinctivists’ (e.g. James, 1890; McDougall, 1913, 1932) and later ethologists and ‘neo-instinctivists’ (e.g. Koestler, 1978; Lorenz, 1966) byde-emphasising the biological aspects of Freud’s work in favour of Freud’s observations on the cultural influences upon human personality and behaviour.

societies.7 Principally she suggests that Freud, along with Nietzsche and Marx, make up a

triumvirate of thinkers, each of whom challenged the ‘‘givenness’’ attributed to consciousness, perceiving it instead as an effect rather than a cause of: class relations

(Marx), the will to power (Nietzsche), or psychical agencies (Freud). Freud in particular, she suggests, by questioning the individual’s ability to know oneself, helps to destabilise the intrinsic logocentricism upon which Western metaphysics is based. Here Grosz goes as far as to suggest that the seeds of postmodern thinking are, already at this early stage, sown in