TMoP Chap 1: Grief in TMoP, Freud on

[Mark Kohut]

Seems to me that Coetzee accents D's 'denial', as we call it these days, of his son's death...Feels it as a dark 'presence"....D. resists acceptance through mourning.....(as an inveterate gambler, he thinks of a turn of the wheel....)

on Freud:
"It was grief that came foremost to Freud's notice. Not only had many died during World War I, but also many of Freud's family members and friends were suffering from depression, agitation, physical ailments, and suicidal thoughts and behavior. Later he realized that many people lived in grief for deaths not related to the war and that these losses might account for their various emotional and physical problems. Freud's grief-work theory suggested the importance of expressing grief and detaching emotionally from the deceased in order to recover full function."

MK Misc.
Dreams of falling were seen by Freud---and are still seen by most analysts
as anxiety dreams...dreams of losing control...drowning in TMoP? (as D. dreams of falling into water)

Most important line below, imho, as the book unfolds: "The mourning or death process is similar to the creative process."

"In his essay, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud states that melancholia, like mourning, is a reaction of grief to the loss of a loved object. "In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself."[3] Therefore, mourning is grief over the loss of someone or something beloved. Melancholia is grief over the loss of the ego. "With one exception, the same traits (of melancholia) are met with in mourning,"[4] Freud states. Melancholia remains an unnatural open wound; mourning, a natural process, frees the participant upon its completion. The mourning or death process is similar to the creative process … the mourning process is a death process for the living in which the participant travels the cycle of adjustment when a loved one leaves. In the death process one may or may not find permanent rebirth, but one loses self-awareness and so achieves a temporary rebirth at least. In the mourning process, one must find
 rebirth; if not, one is in a cycle of melancholia instead. The mourning/death process, likened to the creative process,[5] gives new life, new art, new form.