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57 CHAPTER SIX Emotion, Affect, Drive For Teresa Brennan ‫ﱡﱣﱢﱡ‬ Charles Shepherdson I delivered an earlier version of this essay in October of 2003 at a memorial symposium celebrating the life and work of Teresa Brennan. I want to express my thanks to Kelly Oliver and Liz Grosz for organizing that memorial event for Teresa Brennan, and especially for inviting me to participate. It was a privilege to be there with so many of her distinguished friends, and to have a chance not only to think about her work together, but also to address in some way her sudden departure, which came as a shock to so many of us.1 I In the opening sentence of “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud speaks of “the affect of mourning” (SE 14: 243).2 In the face of a death, the work of mourning brings with it a certain affective state. Accordingly, the word for mourning, Trauer, designates not only the activity of the mourner, but also the disposition or grief that accompanies it. Trauer is thus both the ritual activity (social or religious) that one undertakes in the face of a death, and also the state of mind (mood, disposition, affective state—Stimmung, in Heidegger’s vocabulary) that characterizes the one who mourns. Freud notes that the position of melancholia should be distinguished from that of mourning. When the mourner withdraws from the world, unable for a time to continue with normal life, it is the loss of the object that causes suffering. The world has become suddenly poor. This is also true for the melancholic, for whom a beloved object has likewise been lost. But in the case of the melancholic, the loss of this object is intolerable, and the object, instead of being altogether lost, is maintained within the subject, entombed within the ego itself where it continues to live, with a life that brings suffering to the subject. This suffering is different from what we find in the case of mourning. We must therefore distinguish between the grief of the subject who mourns, a grief that I will call an emotion, for reasons that will become apparent, and the suffering of the ego in melancholia, which is perhaps something different from emotion. If Freud begins by speaking not simply of mourning, but of the “affect of mourning,” it is perhaps because this affect will be a central clue to the difference that he finds in melancholia, where the ego suffers in a different way because the object remains alive within the ego. For Freud, one consequence of this difference is that the ego is split in melancholia such that one part of the ego is deprived of the object of love in a way that is similar to mourning, while the other part of the ego, the part that has identified with the lost object, exhibits a series of distinctively melancholic conditions—conditions that Freud gathers together under the heading of self-reproach. “The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable…He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy” (SE 14: 246). The melancholic exhibits “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” (ibid.). This is the consequence of the internalization of the lost object, for Freud, who condenses the matter in a beautiful formulation: “In mourning it is the world that has become empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” Now most of the clinical literature on melancholia has taken up this feature of self-reproach, guilt, and even hatred, insofar as the splitting of the ego in melancholia allows the subject to hate in himself the object that has died and abandoned him. We have become familiar with this discussion in several contexts, but perhaps most famously in discussions of the Holocaust, the AIDS pandemic, and other events that confront us with the problem of “survivor guilt.” “The shadow of the object fell upon the ego,” Freud says, “and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency as though it were an object, a forsaken object” (SE 14: 249). We know that this special agency is taken up elsewhere by Freud in his work on the ravages of the superego, which speaks in a voice that is not the voice of the subject, but that nevertheless commands the subject in an irrevocable and terrible way.3 Most of...

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