A Pilgrimage Into the Liminal: The Work of Mourning

Keyword(s):  
Curationis ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrika De Villiers

The mourning process is a normal and universal reaction to loss. Awareness of the loss, confrontation and adaption are the main phases of the mourning process, although each mourner’s reactions are highly individulised. Mourning can be regarded as essential “work” — which can never be escaped. The bond with the deceased must be untied, the mourner must adapt to the new environment without the loved one and then form new relationships. In offering support to mourners one should be there, allow them to express their emotions in their own way and to talk about the deceased and their feelings of guilt. One should also lead them to understand that their reaction is normal and that the work of mourning must be completed. After considerable time sensitive attempts may be made to direct the mourner to the future.


SubStance ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Nouri Gana ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Pascale-Anne Brault ◽  
Michael Naas
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 663-687
Author(s):  
Jessica Auchter ◽  
Bruna Holstein Meireles ◽  
Victor Coutinho Lage

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this third group of contributions, Jessica Auchter, Bruna Holstein Meireles and Victor Coutinho Lage draw broadly on Derrida’s writings to explore the spectrality of the international or inter-state-eal: of politics itself being based on hospitality toward the ghost as foreign guest, of the possibility of enacting a politics of spectrality that might aspire to a new kind of universality, and of how a ‘without international’ might escape the series of prisons that constitutes the international.


2021 ◽  
pp. 75-131
Author(s):  
Martha Sprigge

Chapter 2 charts the development of new mourning rites in East Germany, focusing on the role that music played in these ceremonies. Death rituals articulated a new death culture for the socialist state. This chapter examines three aspects of East German death culture: the reestablishment of ceremonies to honor communist heroes from the Weimar Republic, state burials for East German politicians, and manuals published for funeral planning intended for the general public. Visually and rhetorically, state ceremonies were political displays that marginalized the emotional needs of the mourning community. But the music in these services intoned the new country’s connections to customs that the ruling party were explicitly attempting to displace: the Nazis’ heroic burial customs and the mourning rituals of the Lutheran church. In early efforts to fashion a socialist sepulchral culture across multiple artforms, a gap emerged between political ideology and musical reality that allowed composers, performers, and audiences to enact the work of mourning through music.


2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 979-1004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry C. Markman

Analyst and patient occasionally arrive at moments of heightened meaning and aliveness. These moments can be transformative and lead to psychic change in the patient. They give life and arouse hope, and feel “real” in a new way, though often entailing emotional turbulence. Specific internal work must be done by the analyst to allow for and foster these experiences. This involves a kind of mourning process in the analyst that allows for “presence” and “availability” as described by Gabriel Marcel, and for the “at-one-ment” described by Bion. These transforming moments can be viewed in an aesthetic realm, along the lines of Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” This embodies the analytic value of emotional truth. These moments are shared and their emergence is an intersubjective creation. Clinical illustrations show how the internal work of mourning by the analyst through directed introspection allows for presence and availability, and then for shared moments of beauty with the patient.


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