(DOWNLOAD) "Calculating Loss in Tennyson's in Memoriam (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Calculating Loss in Tennyson's in Memoriam (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 237 KB
Description
Subtraction and Division Contemporary attitudes toward recovery from loss have inevitably been influenced by Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917). Freud's essay contrasts the work of mourning, whereby the subject detaches itself from the lost object and retrieves its independence, with the condition of melancholia, wherein the subject's refusal to sever the emotional bonds with the lost object results in a confused, diffuse identity. The problem with the successful mourning conceived by "Mourning and Melancholia" is that it permits no salutary fragmentation--the fragmented ego is considered ill, broken, discontinuous with the present. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud revises his rigid distinction between melancholia and mourning, admitting that the work of mourning is rarely ever completed and that identification with the lost object, previously considered the cause of melancholia, is actually a necessary stage in development of the ego. (1) In fact, he suggests, "It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects" (p. 19), implying that the self is constructed out of a progression of losses and substitutions. The post-mourning intact ego is therefore a conceptual rather than an observed phenomenon. So while "Mourning and Melancholia" has bequeathed to us the influential ideal of a healthy ego as one that is whole, in fact the ego's work of mourning is necessarily unfinished. As Freud himself came to understand, the ego's associations reach further with each experience; a fragmented ego is one that goes on living. The symptoms of melancholia are not its afflictions but its techniques.