Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgeraldis The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief

Since at least the late 1960s, scholars seeking to understand experiences of social or collective bereavement have drawn on Freud's influential distinction between mourning and melancholia. The distinction is by now well known. "Mourning" designates, on Freud's account, a psychic response to loss that reaches a definite end or conclusion, since the mourner is able to work through grief in a relatively unambivalent fashion—and so to relinquish past attachments in the name of forming new ones. Melancholia, by contrast, is mourning crippled by a hostility toward what one has lost that prevents one from fully relinquishing it; it entails an ambivalent incorporation of the object as a strategy for keeping one's argument with it going and results in a sense of inner desolation, an incapacity to form new attachments, and a self-beratement whose unconscious target is the internalized object—but whose intensity can nonetheless culminate in the melancholic's suicide ("Mourning" 243-53).

Early efforts to use this distinction for exploring collective losses accepted uncritically Freud's understanding of melancholia as a pathology, even as they offered important modifications to his theory. Most significant among these efforts was Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's The Inability to Mourn. The Mitscherlichs sought to explain the widespread failure in postwar Germany to confront the nation's Nazi past. They argued that, in the wake of the Third Reich's humiliating defeat, German society should have undergone a kind of melancholic crisis, a collective plunge into depression at the enforced rupture of individual egos from the Führer as ego-ideal. This melancholic reaction was for the Mitscherlichs the condition of authentic mourning; that is, they thought of melancholia not merely as a crippling psychic debility but also as a more primitive or archaic moment in mourning: a state arising from the loss of identifications so profound as to be constitutive of one's self, and a state which must be worked through in order to establish the sense of separateness that enables one to relinquish what one has lost. Only through this process could the German people have overcome (rather than repress) the narcissistic identifications that provided the psychosocial support for the Holocaust. And only then could so many begin to mourn the genocidal deaths in which they had psychically collaborated. The Mitscherlichs described a number of strategies by which German people evaded this labor, including a tendency to cast themselves as victims, an effort to "derealize" the past, the desperately immediate transfer of allegiance to the Allies, and the collective manic defenses embodied symptomatically in the "economic miracle."

The Inability to Mourn sparked an enormously fruitful controversy in West Germany upon its publication in 1967. I raise it here, in a quite different context, because it seems to me the product of a moment that feels surprisingly remote from our own—a moment when politically committed intellectuals could still believe with some sanguinity that social losses ought to be mourned, that successful mourning was both possible and socially preferable to melancholia. ¹ To put it this way is to simplify slightly, since the Mitscherlichs trouble Freud's distinction by recasting melancholia as the prerequisite for mourning; but they value the melancholic state only as an unavoidable necessity. They see it as an affliction caused by the loss of certain kinds of social bonds and insist that it has to be worked through in the name of inventing a society that remembers, rather than unconsciously repeats, a murderous and authoritarian past.

By the early 1990s, when Eric Santner extended the Mitscher lichs' analysis in his Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, a shift in critical attitudes toward melancholia had placed new demands on the call for mourning. Santner devotes significant portions of his first chapter to the posthumous discovery of...