A Study in Mourning: Psychoanalysis and Theology in dialogue

‘My soul is bereft of peace.   I have forgotten what happiness is.’

                                                                                                                   The Book of Lamentations

It is a daunting business putting grief into words. Everyday speech is simply inadequate. Psychology has described mourning as a task, which sounds reassuringly do-able. But in the throes of bereavement, the mental agony both attracts and repels our attempts to comprehend it. We want to assuage the loss with some kind of answer, but we are equally afraid of what that answer might be. The author of Lamentations opts simply to hold up a mirror to deprivation, an approach that has stood the test of centuries.

My father went to war in Burma as a young man of 23. Malaria and dysentery nearly killed him before the Japanese could. He took part in the capture of Rangoon and witnessed the aftermath of the infamous railway over the River Kwai.  When I first formed an idea of him as his child, he was twelve years older and a successful manufacturer in South Yorkshire. But he had got there by repressing memories of exhaustion, delirium, fear and who knows what else. When he came to die slowly over two years in his eighties, it was either as that soldier, taciturn and turned in on himself, or as an infant, panicking for attention. He left his wife and his first-born with a strong share of his trauma.

I responded both pro-actively and reactively. My training as a therapist had taught me that the courage to mourn must be found, for the alternative is far worse: the lingering death-in-life of melancholic helplessness. On the other hand – and here my father’s legacy came to the fore – l felt ashamed of being bereaved. I did not wish to cry at all, and was embarrassed when seen to weep.

A theological understanding helped to bring these two different responses together. There is a thread implicit in the gospels that suggests Christ meets those in particular who are conscious of their defeat and paralysed by apprehension. Think of the dreadful moments when Peter lets himself down. There is at such moments a theophany, a God happening; we could equally say a miracle, a special and amazing signification. Contrary to popular conception,  theophany and miracle are  not necessarily obvious but more like a seed buried in the ground that will grow over time. 

If you are not religious, and the fore-going begins to suggest superstition, you may prefer to think of it as a gestalt or coming together of hitherto disparate elements which combine to create fresh meaning and opportunity. 

The outcome in theological terms is an atonement (or at-one-ment), a restoration of unity. Psychologically, a gestalt renews the mind's ability to absorb and reflect on traumatising experience. It can begin to come to terms with the damage to cognitive functioning.

In both accounts, the event occurs beyond human control. It cannot be brought about. No research can guarantee the outcome. It belongs to metaphysics and not to science. The best one can hope for is to cultivate the circumstances that are favourable to it.

What follows is a narrative of just such an experience, understood through the prism of the psychoanalysis in which I was trained. The account refers to two mental processes described by Sigmund Freud and a third by Ignacio Matte Blanco, the Chilean psychiatrist.

It is worth noting that Freud’s mature work on mourning was itself forged in extremely difficult circumstances. His study Mourning and Melancholia was published at the height of the war in 1917. The Austro-Hungarian homeland was dismembered in 1918 and in 1920 his daughter Sophie died of pneumonia. In 1923, Freud had an operation to remove a cancer from his mouth. While he was recovering, news reached him that Sophie’s small son Heinz had also died. Later that year, surgeons removed the whole of his right upper jaw and palate. A metal prosthesis was fitted, which he named ‘the monster’. In 1933 his books were burnt by the Nazis and in 1939, not a moment too soon, he escaped to London where he died several months later. These were experiences that informed his work. What then can he teach us?

Firstly - a mourner’s thoughts are subject to condensation. Sadness creates distress; strong emotion scatters thought.  A focus is sought that restores order. Here the time-scale is short: were it longer it would be termed an obsession. Feeling drives thinking, so that the various meanings contained within any possibly relevant associated thoughts converge upon a single object, present to the mind as a nagging idea. 
In the days after my father died at home, my mother talked constantly about what to do with his bed. It was only two years old, she said. It had been expensive. It was much too heavy for her to move, nor was she at all sure that she wanted to move it. Not yet, anyway. What was she going to do with the bed? All the agony of her loss bore down  upon this piece of furniture. It evoked a settled, safe, carefree past; it was the unwanted focus of a recent bed-bound past, filled with her endeavours as carer  and her ultimate failure: and it also presented the big question of her future - her new potency as a widow.

Freud’s second insight into a mourner’s thoughts was to suggest they are subject to wish-fulfilment. That is to say, a desire is assumed to be realised, whether it actually is or not. During my father’s slow decline in health, there were many moments when my mother’s wish-fulfilment was all that kept her going. ‘I want him to get better’, her attitude implied, ‘so, as far as I'm concerned, he is getting better!’ It frequently caused me to feel angry with her. Why could she not see that she was kidding herself?  I preferred to acknowledge the possibility of his imminent death, but then I wasn't living with him. This situation went on for two years.

Freud had a low opinion of wish-fulfilment, which he thought of as thoroughly childish. Moreover he was convinced that it explained attempts by religion to assuage the terror of death. But the mechanism of wish-fulfilment can also serve the desire not to invent a metaphysical entity, but to invest in it.   Love and Hope owe whatever objective existence they possess to social transmission rather than to natural causes. Who was I to say that my mother was deluded? She was the one who removed my father from the nursing home in which he was sinking fast. She it was who battled on as his personal nurse for six more months of mixed happiness and sorrow. Sometimes, a belief at odds with the facts can take those facts and turn them right around.

Theologically, we are in the territory of faith and prayer which draw upon  religious texts such as the Psalms. There are also occasional reports that wish-fulfilment has been reciprocated – instances of theophany and miracle. Desperation may produce fantasies that strain credulity, but on occasion what actually happens also defies explanation. This is a conceptual space that civilized society does well to guard against scepticism. Freud is known to have admired St Augustine’s Confessions, where we find the choice  described either to go with the vagaries to which desire can lead, however crazy they may seem; or else, to pursue the logic of rationalism and give up on desire altogether. Thankfully,  Materialism has yet to go that far in pursuit of epistemic perfection.

This licence to be mad brings us to Matte Blanco’s insight. The mind of the mourner, he suggested, is threatened with fragmentation. To hold itself together as best it can, the mind associates the ideas available to it on the basis not of normal logical differentiation but of symmetry. Consider these examples:-

          If A is angry with B, then B is also felt by A to be angry with A, whether B actually is or not. The symmetry is around anger.

        If B is A’s mother, then A also acts in a motherly way towards B. The symmetry is around mothering.

·        If B prepares a meal, the meal is also experienced by B as somehow preparing B. The symmetry is around preparing.

In this extraordinary but actually quite common state of mind, self and other become interchangeable around a shared focus. Reciprocity runs wild.

A month after my father’s funeral, I had my mother to stay. When we later returned to her home, I discovered that her electric kettle had been on for three days. It was an old plastic one and it had boiled dry but not melted and nor had it thrown a fuse. Indeed, to my astonishment, it still worked. However, I decided it was unsafe and drove immediately to the shops and bought another one. It was made of durable metal and it was smaller – a more sensible size for someone who would now be living alone. 
My mother took one look at it and demanded I take it back. It was too heavy … it was too small … why ever did I think she would stop making tea for her grandchildren?  And anyway, she liked her old one which was perfectly all right.

The following morning, I was laying out breakfast. My mother likes her butter in a small hard rectangle, straight from the fridge. This has always irritated me because you can’t spread it evenly on a slice of toast. Knowing, but not acknowledging, that I was transgressing, I gave it ten seconds in the microwave and it came out pleasingly sloppy.  When my mother entered the room, she noticed almost immediately and snapped at me for ‘making a mess of the butter’. I promptly burst into tears, saying that I was only trying to help. My heart protested inside me that my own grief was never acknowledged because she was so wrapped up in herself.

My mother then underwent a complete and totally unexpected change of demeanour. It was almost as if she and I had woken up from a dream. She apologised and offered to comfort me. I overcame my reluctance and let her hug me. The hug quickly became mutually reassuring. We then sat down and ate our breakfast in a silence that started out  cautiously but soon became companionable.

What had happened? Condensation was active in my preoccupation with the kettle and the butter. So too was wish-fulfilment as I envisaged a future for my mother that was more my vision than her own. Symmetry was evident in the point-blank disagreements between us and the intolerance of each other's position. The focus of the symmetry over kettle and butter was our mothering – mine of her, and hers, not really of me but of herself. The strain of unreality within the symmetry, with its distorted expression of desire, led to a crisis followed by an eruption of clarity that allowed the true parent and child relationship to re-establish itself. It was a moment in which both of us could escape the self-centred and aggressive behaviour with which we had been defending ourselves.

That we were atoned is, I think, clear; but it was not really through an effort of will on either part. Rather we had stumbled across a larger state of being that presented itself in that instant as an obvious choice, as the fulfilment of a latent buried desire for mutual good. The mixture of wounded-ness and wounding in my clumsy attempts to right wrongs had collided head-on with my mother’s egotistical need to control. The resultant fall-out brought with it an astonishing comfort and reconciliation.