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Regan Rosburg
Advisor: Peter Rostovsky
September 8, 2014
The Death of Everything: An Epidemic of Global Melancholia
In my work, I am interested in the loss of habitat, ecosystems, and species
due to human action on Earth. This includes, but is not limited to, climate change,
pollution, overpopulation, and wars waged over exploited resources. It is my
observation that there is an underlying feeling of hopelessness that nests inside the
majority of people I have come in contact with, all over the world. Furthermore,
there is a deep sadness that is felt by witnessing the amalgamation of material
objects that fill our lives, the advertising images that fill our gazes, and the constant
blinking on and off of technological devices in our ears. There is a stress felt from
the constant push to survive a world straining to keep up with the demands we put
upon it. There is a sadness that no one wants to talk about. There is a grieving
happening, because there is a death no one is talking about: the death of everything.
I propose that we are in the midst of a global epidemic of unaddressed grief,
the proportions of which are so vast that it is entirely too incomprehensible for
most to think about, process or address. I feel that we are in a state of mourning,
and in some ways, of melancholia. By examining Sigmund Freud’s described
characteristics of mourning and melancholia, and moving through our cultural
needs to bring closure to death through rituals, I will demonstrate how this state of
global grief is evident in our culture at this time.
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According to the Kubler-Ross model, the stages of grief, which are by and
large universal to the human experience, begin with denial and isolation, and move
through bargaining and depression. They finally end with acceptance. The stages
are in line with the concept of mourning.
Sigmund Freud outlines his theory of mourning in his writing entitled On the
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. He describes mourning as the natural
process of loss and grief. Freud’s concept of mourning relates to either the loss of a
real object (such as a person) or an abstract idea (such as the loss of love, one’s
country, liberty, or an ideal) (243). Whether the loss is literal or symbolic, the
mourner experiences a period of grief in which he processes the memories and
attachments to the lost object or concept. When the work of mourning is over, the
ego is free, and the person becomes uninhibited again.1 Mourning, then, is a
converter of remembrances into a futureless memory. The object of loss is tangible.
Freud contrasts mourning with the concept of melancholia. The same
feelings that are associated with mourning, namely isolation and depression, are
still evident in a state of melancholia (Freud 244). However, Freud describes
melancholia as pathological (243). The pathos of melancholia is seeded in the
unconscious mind. It happens when the object of loss is not rationally
comprehended. This occurs when, for example, the object “has not perhaps actually
died, but has been lost as an object of love” (Freud 245). The lack of closure, then,
occurs because the death or loss becomes abstract. Freud writes:
1. “Mourning comes to decisive and ‘spontaneous end’ when the survivor has detached his or her emotional tie
to the lost object and reattached the free libido to a new object, thus accepting consolation in the form of a
substitute for what has been lost “ (Freud 245).
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[When one] “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost… it is all the more
reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he
has lost…the patent is aware of the loss which has given rise to the
melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not
what he has lost within him” (245). 2
With mourning, it is easy for outside witnesses to see who or what is making
the person grieve; it is the loss of an object, be it abstract or real. In melancholia, it
is not entirely clear to the outside witness what it is that distresses the afflicted
person so completely because the patient cannot identify it consciously either. The
focus of the patient’s self-absorption, Freud says, becomes the dislike of the ego
itself (246). As such, the patient develops an inferiority complex, and this consumes
his ego. The patient develops the following characteristics: self-reproach,
sleeplessness, refusal to take nourishment, and other acts that overcome “the
instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (Freud 246).
What creates this melancholic self-hatred and abandonment? Freud believes
that these reproaches have been shifted from the lost loved object and onto the
patient’s own ego. To put it another way, mourning is healthy because the love for
the object, and the loss of it, exists outside the ego. Melancholia is unhealthy because
the love of the object cannot be given up, even though the object itself has been
given up. The love takes refuge inside the narcissistic mind of the sufferer, along
2. To put it another way, one feels a sense of loss for an object, but when closure becomes abstracted or nonexistent (due to a lack of purposeful, conscious thoughts and actions directed towards relinquishing attachment)
the object rests in the unconscious mind as a source of constant torment. It becomes a suppressed living
memory of which no sense can be made, and with which no closure can happen. The object-loss is relegated to a
disconnected, unconscious mind.
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with all of the feelings of dejection, ambivalence, punishment, anger, and longing
towards the object of love.
In the case of a global epidemic of mourning and melancholia, I believe our
source of grief comes from both emotional connection, and emotional disconnect.3
Our collective mourning is emotional connection, and comes from the witnessing of
deaths. If the deaths directly affect us on a personal level, or within our community,
we enter the state of mourning. This kind of death could take many forms, from a
direct experience of extreme weather patterns (which have hit, in some fashion,
nearly every inch of the globe) to the death of organisms due to these patterns, such
as loss of bees and pollinators in one’s back yard, or pine trees on one’s property
due to the pine beetle, and so on. In these cases, we experience mourning, for there
is a death of an object that exists outside the self. Our direct experience with the
object allows for us to process it.
This need to have a direct experience with the deceased is believed by some
to be the deciding factor that helps passage through the stages of mourning to
acceptance. In American culture,4 the contact that one has with the deceased after
death has become increasingly distant, and in some cases is gone entirely. In her
book American Afterlife, Kate Sweeney presents the story of a funeral director who
3. Each individual is a part of a vast network of living species on a planet in which all organisms can trace their
DNA back to the same creative genetic soup. As Ursula Goodenough puts it in her book The Sacred Depths of
Nature, changes and mutations of all living organisms over time have yielded highly advanced and specialized
species that are not only attuned to their environment, but to each other. In her words, “We are connected all
the way down” (Goodenough 73).
4. Victorian traditions of mourning carried over into American traditions, including periods of sitting with the
body in the family parlor (Sweeney 132). After the 1940s, funerals began to move to a separate building, the
funeral parlor. Burials themselves went from placing a body into a pine box into the ground, to elaborate
embalming, to caskets, to elaborate waterproof caskets, to concrete tombs above or below the ground. Even in
the case of cremations, oftentimes the family is not present to watch the burning of the body (Sweeney 140).
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speaks of the tradition of being present with the body, whether during burial or
cremation. The director says:
“Maybe if you don’t look at the death, maybe it didn’t happen. Have you ever
heard anyone say ‘I can’t believe Joan is dead’? Well maybe they didn’t go to
the funeral, but seeing is believing. The body in a casket. That’s how
infantile, sometimes, we are” (qtd. In Sweeney 135).
Therefore, to witness the death is an important part of closure. Sometimes
we learn about new deaths on television. As such, even though we do not
experience these deaths personally, the media gives us the opportunity to have
closure because we see them, and we are now aware they have happened. We
mourn globally, each death, all of us looking into televisions and briefly taking note
of another forest cut down, another species gone extinct, another village filling up
with floodwaters. Unfortunately, with each added death we experience, the period
of mourning is extended. Like the Victorians, we seem to always be wearing black. 5
However, just because we see it does not mean we see it. Clips and news
bulletins of the horrors happening only go halfway; they provide no direct contact,
just the residue of immeasurable loss. Moreover, the sheer quantity of collapsing
systems (ecological, social, geographical) is so incomprehensible in number that
they are difficult for any person to grasp. It becomes entirely abstract as an object of
love and loss. This, I believe, is the cause of our melancholia. As Freud wrote, when
5. According to Sweeney, the Victorian tradition of mourning was one of lingering on death. This was partially
due to rules surrounding the amount of time one was to mourn a specific family member’s death. Usually a
death would require a year of wearing black and being excused from social engagements. However, if the
mourning period of one person was punctuated by yet another death, the period of time would be extended
accordingly. This resulted in mourners spending years of their lives wearing black (Sweeney 18-20).
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one cannot clearly see what has been lost, one cannot consciously perceive what he
has lost, and he knows something is gone, but not what has been lost inside him. If
we are all part of a global network6 from which we cannot separate ourselves, then
we are experiencing the stripping away of objects of love without an explanation or
reason, without a “Dear John” note.
We are experiencing ambivalence, fear, anger, dejection, longing, and
unrequited love for species we have never seen, for melting glaciers we ourselves
have never touched, for cities that are drying up, and for disappearing bees. Our
symptoms of internalized anger vary, but mostly I see the characteristics of
disbelief, avoidance, and helplessness. We are not angry at our objects of love,
these irreplaceable and innocent species we feel and see dying. However, quite
tragically, we implicate ourselves in being part of the problem, and our self-loathing
is seeded in that very place of truthful implication.
6 In her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennet writes of this interconnectedness between human and nonhuman
entities on Earth. She states “And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very
well be to harm oneself” (13).
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Works Cited
Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. United States of America:
Duke University Press, 2010. Print.
Clewell, Tammy. "Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis of Loss."
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52.1 (2002): 43-67. N,
Mar. 2004. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.
Freud, Sigmund. On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement; Papers on
Metapyschology and Other Works. Trans. James Strachey, Ana Freud, Alix
Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. 243-258.
Print.
Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
Sweeney, Kate. American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning. Athens: U
of Georgia, 2014. Print.