CONTRIBUIÇÕES PSICANALÍTICAS ACERCA DO LUTO E DA MELANCOLIA

A temática do luto e melancolia é demasiadamente importante no estudo psicanalítico e tem sido estudada desde o criador da psicanálise, Sigmund Freud, até autores contemporâneos que acrescentaram e revisaram as ideias iniciais. A perda do objeto de amor propicia ao indivíduo a experiência do luto, enquanto, na melancolia, o estado de sofrimento psíquico se dá a partir da perda ou danificação dos objetos internos sem, necessariamente, a perda de um objeto real. Os estados de luto e melancolia desencadeiam sofrimento psíquico, podendo inclusive levar o indivíduo ao patológico. O presente estudo tem como objetivo elucidar elementos presentes no luto e na melancolia e o processo de elaboração psíquica, utilizando como recurso artístico o filme Melancolia (2011) do diretor dinamarquês Lars Von Trier, articulando as teorias psicanalíticas acerca do tema, seus desdobramentos e consequências psíquicas. Para isso, utilizou-se como metodologia a revisão bibliográfica. A análise dos mecanismos encontrados na personagem Justine da obra de Lars Von Trier e suas vivências subjetivas dos processos ligados à melancolia permite avaliar importantes aspectos sobre a identificação melancólica e a temática da perda de objeto e investimentos afetivos com o mundo externo. Conclui-se que a melancolia, apesar de apresentar aspectos patológicos e prejuízos no campo afetivo e social, pode possibilitar potencialidades e saídas criativas em situações de desamparo diante da possibilidade de finitude humana, enquanto no processo de elaboração do luto envolve a escolha de um objeto substituto. PSYCHOANALYTICAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO MOURNING AND MELANCHOLY ABSTRACT The mourning and the melancholy issues are profoundly important for psychoanalytic study, and it has been studied from the creator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud to contemporary authors who added and revised the first concepts. Losing beloved ones results in the mourning experience to the individual, whereas in melancholy the suffering mental feeling comes from losing or damaging internal objects, without necessarily losing a real object. Mourning and melancholy conditions trigger mental suffering and may even lead the individual to a pathological condition. The present study aims at elucidating mourning and melancholy elements, and the psychic elaboration process, using the film Melancolia (2011) by the Danish director Lars Von Trier as an artistic resource, articulating the psychoanalytic theories about the issue, outcomes, and psychic consequences. In this regard, the literature review was used as a methodology. The analysis of the mechanisms found in the character Justine of Lars Von Trier's artwork, and his subjective experiences of the processes related to melancholy, allows us to evaluate important aspects as concerns melancholy identification and the loss of object issue and affective investments with the external world. It is concluded that melancholy, despite presenting pathologic aspects and damages for affective and social areas, may provide potentialities and creative results for abandon situations when facing the possibility of human finitude, whereas in the natural mourning stage involves the displacement mechanism. Descriptors: Mourning. Melancholy. Movie theater. Psychoanalysis.

Epistemic Fragments

This is an attempt to think through the idea that human knowledge has no fundamental ground. It seemed best to present this gesture in fragments rather than argument. In the questioning pursuit of absolute certainty, one ultimately finds the promise of such certainty itself to be what is most questionable and uncertain. With this newfound uncertainty, the ground falls away and an abyss opens up which makes one wonder if and how we know anything at all. What is miraculous is that, despite this epistemic abyss, we nonetheless can and do know—just not in a firmly grounded, absolutely certain way. We rather seem to make recourse to “commonsensical” articles of faith which make understanding possible for us as much as they limit us. Perhaps these brief fragments are ultimately concerned with human knowledge and human finitude, as they are an attempt to humble aspirations toward certain, grounded knowledge in one regard, yet they hopefully gesture toward what may actually be possible for human knowledge in another.

Heidegger’s Angst and apocalyptic anxiety

In this article I distinguish between the existential anxiety evoked by a confrontation with human finitude and what I call Apocalyptic anxiety signaling the end of human civilization itself. The end of civilization would terminate the historical process that gives meaning to individual existence. Apocalyptic anxiety announces the collapse of all meaningfulness, a possibility so horrifying that it commonly leads to evasion of its source.

Towards a Theological Anthropology of the Digital Age

The paper aims at providing some introductory insights in the project of a theological anthropology of the digital age. The objective is to show that theological anthropology can help us gain an original and valid perspective on the technological transformation we have been experiencing during the last few decades. In order to do so, it is not enough to underline the analogy between some sources of the Judeo-Christian tradition and some aspects of the so-called digital culture. Instead, the objective is to show that theology can offer some theoretical instruments able to offer a deeper insight in our condition. The paper starts from the notion of finitude, interpreted as a blessing and not as a “limit” of our nature. Through the distinction between Promethean and Epimethan approaches to technology, the text focuses on three core aspects of human finitude: corporeality, inner life and otherness.

Wallace Stevens and the Temporalities of Inception and Embodiment

Beginning with Wallace Stevens’s reimagining of the Promethean origins of man (depicted in The Metamorphoses) in “The Rock,” the chapter argues that this poem’s imagining of origin makes manifest ways his thinking about embodiment and temporality has shifted since the early poems—since, for example, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” These early poems can be read to assert the body’s power to transcend itself, paradoxically by dwelling on its desiring and ephemeral nature; they assert the body’s power to transcend human finitude by coupling it with the capacity for sensuous evocation in poetic language. Detailed readings of these poems spell out the complications of this assertion. By “The Rock,” Stevens’s figures have taken on an arid abstraction: Their concrete immediacy often seems in inverse relation to their possible visualization, and the claim of a poetic power of transcendence is difficult to distinguish from the radical destitution of meaning voided in a pure material presence. The earlier poems’ concern with embodiment has been transposed to a more primal drama of inception: the coming into being of the poem and the poetic voice, prior to persons, forms, or meanings.

Teach Me What I Do Not See: Lessons for the Church From a Global Pandemic

In an attempt to learn from COVID-19, this essay features six responses to the question: what did COVID-19 teach us, expose in us, or purge out of us when it comes to spiritual formation in Christ? Each response was written independently of the others by one of the coauthors. Diane J. Chandler focuses in on how COVID-19 exposed grievous inequities for ethnic groups in the American church and broader society. Kelly M. Kapic reminds us of the goodness of human finitude and how COVID restrictions have forced many of us to embrace our limitations. Siang-Yang Tan reflects on eight lessons he has learned during this pandemic year in his role shepherding a local church. James C. Wilhoit calls us to consider the structures that are needed for local church leadership to make wise and godly decisions in times of crisis. Richard Peace draws our attention to what might be learned from the forced monasticism brought about by COVID-19 quarantines. Finally, Ruth Haley Barton pauses to consider the interdependence of human life that has been dramatically illustrated by this pandemic. While these six responses certainly do not exhaust all there is for the church to learn from COVID, we present them in the spirit of “O Lord, teach us what we do not see” and hope they will inspire your own reflections.

The Limits of Autobiographical Logic. On the Impossibility of Narrating One’s Death

The practice of life writing seems to exclude the incorporation of the writer’s death. How can autobiography come to terms with this blind spot? Are there any strategies that enable the horizon or end of the writer’s life (‘bios’) to be integrated into his or her reflections thereof? How can the impulses that are given within the scope of the writer’s contemplation of her/his transience be characterized – and how are they important for ‘life writing’? This contribution examines the autobiographical works by Saint Augustine, Petrarch, and Fontane to illustrate three different models of how life writing sets out to address the different roles that death – or rather, the awareness of human finitude – plays for the genre.

“Our Eyes Adjust to the Dark”: The Cosmic Sublime in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars

The cosmic sublime, as the most spectacular manifestation of the natural sublime, offers rich stimuli for the literary imagination, as well as for various interactions between science, culture and art. In her book of poetry Life on Mars (2011), Tracy K. Smith uses tropes of cosmic perspective, scientific gaze and interplanetary travel to problematize the relationship between human finitude and the boundless unknown of the universe. Written after the death of her father, who was one of the engineers of the Hubble telescope, the volume links personal elegy and the work of mourning with philosophical questions about the relationship between the self and scientifically framed visions of the cosmos. The primary intention of my study is to examine the strategies and implications of the poet’s revisionary engagement with the aesthetics, rhetoric, popular mythology and mysticism of the spatial infinite. Smith employs the cosmic sublime not only as a spatial mode of perception but also as a metaphor of the emotional response to death. Her adaptation of the category expands the frame of reference for the purposes of an existential inquiry into the nature of humanity and transcendence. The celebration of imaginative freedom and modern science’s command of nature is further linked to constant apprehension about the human abuse of power and to anxieties triggered by the sublime mythology of transcendence, informed by a desire for dominating the other to the point of possession.

The Hegel Debate

This chapter delves into Herbert Marcuse's ignored reception of Martin Heidegger's lectures by reconstructing the debate about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel between Marcuse's Hegel book and Heidegger's Hegel lectures. It suggests that the Hegel debate formed the most interesting dimension of Marcuse's Freiburg period. It also elaborates how Marcuse and Heidegger sought to articulate their emerging positions in concrete philosophy and the history of being through a contestation with Hegel. The chapter explains how Heidegger had judged Hegel's debate of history in Being and Time as the unfolding of spirit that is an exact opposite of his own concern with human finitude. It cites Marcuse's argument that the early Hegel understood by “life” is not a feature of the world spirit but of finite human existence.