Heaven after the Loss of Heaven

The chapter analyzes American pop-cultural constructions of heaven as attempts to deal with the symbolic loss of the traditional (biblical, Jewish, and Christian) conceptions of heaven. Accordingly, American pop-cultural heavens take the following forms: (1) heaven as the place for protagonists to “relearn the world” and so reestablish identity and achieve self-fulfillment following loss; (2) heaven as apotheosis of dominant ideologies such as the American Dream or neoconservative militarism, and so paradoxically both retaining and transforming our symbolic bonds with the ethereal realm; (3) heaven as intrinsically relational, a place of reunion with family and pets; (4) heaven made immanent on earth via near-death experiences, mind uploading, and virtual reality; (5) satirical and blasphemous heavens, combining resentment and anger at heaven’s irrevocable loss with an impossible desire for its renewal.

Symbolic Loss, Memory, and Modernization in the Reception of Gnosticism

Social scientist of religion Peter Homans has demonstrated that symbolic loss, cultural memory, and modernization are tightly intertwined. As a consequence of modernization, Western culture has lost a shared relationship to the symbols of its Christian past, leading to religious mourning. This article demonstrates that the category gnosticism opened up an imaginative possibility for individuals to reinterpret the cultural memory of the Christian past and achieve rapprochement with the tradition. The argument proceeds through case studies of psychologist Carl Jung, visionary artist Laurence Caruana, and public speaker Jonathan Talat Phillips. Each case exhibits how symbolic loss of the Christian tradition throws the individual into a period of inner turmoil. When each of them read ancient gnostic texts, they do so to reinterpret the symbols of Christianity, specifically Christ, in ways that respond to forces of modernization. The article concludes that popular and religious interpretations of the ancient gnostics should be recognized as attempts by those who lost Christianity in the West to re-envision its cultural memory and reimagine Christianity in the present.

L’Afrique à rebours: la décadence dans un corpus de littérature Togolaise

During the past fifteen years, the West African country of Togo has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of writers - a third generation since independence from colonisation - working in the French language. Born around 1960, these writers have been making their way onto the literary scene since approximately 1990. A certain number of distinctive traits, which have attracted the attention of critics, unequivocally delineate this generation from the two that preceded it. Among these is a new literary aesthetic that resonates with the fin de siècle - with the end of the twentieth century, but also with the end of the second millennium. Moreover, such ends of time cycles, because they exacerbate apprehension about the future and provoke a desire to re-evaluate the past, are propitious to the development of Decadent literatures.The goal of this contribution is to examine parallels between the nineteenth century Decadence movement and the new literary aesthetic being employed by Togolese writers of the third generation - and to thereby demonstrate that their aesthetic is without question a neo-Decadent one. Not only does it emerge at the end of the century/millennium, a time when humanity is inevitably reflecting on its fate, but it also coincides with the accelerating globalisation of information (the Internet) and of commercial markets, a context worth taking into account in that it represents a symbolic loss of landmarks, and a doing away with traditional frontiers - both themes that have preoccupied Decadents of all times and all places. Using the work of two Togolese writers (Kossi Efoui and Sami Tchak), this article will explore in exactly what ways these writers can be categorized as Decadents, and the different methods of transgression they use to depict their discontent with their society of origin, which, at the end of the twentieth century, is in a situation of political, economic and social decay.

Not by Bread Alone: Symbolic Loss, Trauma, and Recovery in Elephant Communities

Like many humans in the wake of genocide and war, most wildlife today has sustained trauma. High rates of mortality, habitat destruction, and social breakdown precipitated by human actions are unprecedented in history. Elephants are one of many species dramatically affected by violence. Although elephant communities have processes, rituals, and social structures for responding to trauma—grieving, mourning, and socialization—the scale, nature, and magnitude of human violence have disrupted their ability to use these practices. Absent the cultural, carrier groups (murdered elephant matriarchs and elders) who traditionally lead and teach these healing practices, humans must assume the role. Trauma theory has brought attention to victims' severe, sustained psychological damage. Looking through the lens of trauma theory provides a better understanding of how systematic violence has affected individuals and groups and how the pervasive nature of traumatic events affects human-nonhuman animal relationships. The framing of recent trauma theory compels conservationists to create new relationships—neither anthropocentric nor powerbased—with nonhuman animals. The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Kenya, shows how humans, taking on the role of interspecies witness, bring orphan elephants back to health and help re-build elephant communities shattered by genocide.

We (Not So) Happy Few: Symbolic Loss and Mourning in Freud's Psychoanalytic Movement and the History of Psychoanalysis

This paper addresses today's many criticisms of psychoanalysis by exploring their origins in its history. It proposes deepening and broadening our understanding of that history by examining the phenomenon of symbolic loss and mourning as it occurred, not only in Freud' s personal life, but especially in his leadership of the psychoanalytic movement, and in his struggle to recognize and to come to terms with his cultural heritage. It is claimed that these issues persist, in varying degrees and in different forms, in the institutes of today. They do so chiefly in the inability to mourn, first, the loss of Freud as an exemplar of introspective courage and, second, the loss of the symbolic dimensions of Freud's creative oeuvre.