By: R.R. Grinker
Date posted: December 14, 2024.
“All beginnings contain an element of recollection.” When the late British anthropologist Paul Connerton wrote these words (1989: 6), he had in mind a specific kind of memory: social memory that generates and is revitalized in commemorative practices (like rituals, holidays, and parades) as well as in material culture (like monuments, museums, and sacred texts). But there is an even more general point to be made: when we remember, and perhaps especially when the memories cause us pain, we try to find meaning in the pain; and when we search for meaning, we are engaged in creative and imaginative acts.
To illustrate our capacity for creativity, one need only look at two of the subjects covered in our dispatches: “In America: Remember” and “Rami’s Heart.” Both efforts came from mourning losses to COVID-19 – “In America: Remember” from artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg’s desire to mourn and honor the enormous number of people in the US who died from the virus, and “Rami’s Heart” from Rima Samman-Whitaker’s desire to mourn and honor her brother, and to invite us to join her and extend that honor to others. Importantly, the projects continue to grow, even in a divisive political climate in which many in the US deny the realities of the pandemic and urge us to forget. As we will see below, when Freud wrote during WWI about the positive effects of mourning, he was so critical of those who reacted to loss with apathy and dejection rather than with a therapeutic grieving process that he suggested they were engaged in a “revolt” against mourning. To the extent that Firstenberg and Samman-Whitaker’s projects seek to embrace rather than to revolt against mourning, they are counter-revolutionary.
I recently came across a fascinating short article by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, “Transience and Hope: A Return to Freud in a Time of Pandemic” (2021), that might help us understand the value of mourning we see in phenomena like “In America: Remember” and “Rami’s Heart.” I also bring it up for a simple academic reason: it is a relatively unknown work that may be of interest to many scholars who, if they are anything like me, had never even heard of it.
Given the title of his essay, I assumed Lear’s article would be about Freud’s 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia,” since so many scholarly works on the COVID-19 pandemic draw on this classic. Writers in numerous academic disciplines have argued that the pandemic and the restrictions on social interaction that followed (including mortuary rites) complicated the experience of loss, making it hard for survivors to move from what Freud considered pathological grief or melancholia (the unconscious experience of loss as grief of a part of one’s self) to “normal” mourning (the conscious experience of grief as the loss of someone outside of ourselves).
But Lear surprises us. Instead, he discusses Freud’s little-known 1916 piece “On Transience,” a short 2 ½ page reflection. The seeds of “Mourning and Melancholia” are there, but they are symbolized, as in a dream or a parable.
In “On Transience,” Freud reflects on a vacation in 1913, just one year before the onset of WWI, when war, in his words, “robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless” (1957 [1916]: 307). He recounts a summer walk in the countryside (likely the Dolomite mountains in northeastern Italy) – with an unnamed “taciturn friend” and an unnamed “famous poet.” We learn almost nothing about the views of the taciturn friend, who remained taciturn; other than that, he did not enjoy the walk. The poet, however, expresses his displeasure. He becomes despondent when he considers that the beauty around him and indeed “all human beauty” will one day disappear. Freud cannot argue with the fact that many beautiful things perish; but he does dispute the idea that transience should get in the way of enjoying what is currently in front of us. In fact, transience should make that which is beautiful even more beautiful. As Freud puts it, “A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely” (1957 [1916]: 306). Why, then, was the friend unhappy and the poet so disturbed?
Freud writes, “What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt against mourning,” and more specifically the pain of mourning, even if they were unaware of the reason for their melancholy. For Freud, mourning is therapeutic; unlike melancholia, personified by his companions, mourning allows us to appreciate what we love, even if it perishes, while at the same time, it liberates us to attach ourselves to other new objects of love. Mourning doesn’t eliminate the loss—in fact, it transforms the natural phenomenon of death into an experienced loss, an absence in our lives to which we give a psychological meaning, and in so doing provides us with relief. This is the point Lear wishes to make: melancholia fixes us in one place; it is unproductive and can lead to depression, while mourning is creative. What’s more, the pain of mourning—at least one’s socially recognized withdrawal or the impairments in one’s everyday life—eventually wanes.
Lear tells us that he read “On Transience” differently before and during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, he considered it merely a poignant meditation on ephemeral beauty, and the imagined losses of the impending war. After the pandemic, he read it as an allegory of Freud’s own process of mourning. Despite Freud’s insistence that he is different from the poet, having worked through the problem of how to sustain an appreciation of beauty in a chaotic and ephemeral world, there is evidence that Freud on the walk in the Dolomites is also melancholic, grieving a part of himself. Freud writes almost apocalyptically. He says that the war “tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science,” “let loose the evil spirits within us,” “made our country small again,” and “shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races” (307). The losses of pride, admiration, faith in science, the nation, etc. are pieces of Freud, losses of his ideals. He does not sound like someone in “normal” mourning; he sounds like someone who needs to mourn.
Lear is thus convinced that the essay, read as a whole, is an allegory for Freud’s own mourning process. “On Transience,” Lear concludes, is “a performance of psychic repair in the midst of world catastrophe” (2021: 13, emphasis in original). First, Lear suspects no such trip or conversation ever took place. The event is likely a fictional attempt to make a philosophical and psychological argument, and to illustrate a journey into mourning. Second, the two companions are part of Freud’s own mind, as he debates valuing and despairing that which is transient, an internal debate Lear considers to be both something personal for Freud, as well as a general, human, psychological process. By identifying melancholia in his fellow travelers and mourning in his own “working through” of transience, I even wondered if there was some attempt here to symbolize the taciturn traveler as the self-centered Id, the poet as the guilt-ridden superego, and Freud himself as the mediating ego. What’s more, the three individuals may also represent Freud’s reading audience, living in war and ambivalent about the future.
Even those who did not lose friends or family from COVID-19 suffered, as Freud did in WWI, as we witnessed the loss of faith in science, the loss of pride in our leaders, the loss of national unity in the face of a tragedy that, under different historical conditions, might have brought us together. If readers, Lear says, “can use [Freud’s] essay to make a similar journey” it might help them deal with the pain of their losses.
Even within the war, Freud remained optimistic about the possibilities of mourning. He writes that mourning is itself transient, and perhaps even evil is transient: “Once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discover of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”
References Cited
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957 [1916]. “On Transience.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. James Strachey, trans. London: Hogarth.
Lear, Jonathan. 2021. “Transience and Hope: A Return to Freud in a Time of Pandemic.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 102 (1): 3-15.
Lear, Jonathan. 2022. Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Paige Gavin for comments on a draft of this dispatch.