TMoP Chap 1: Grief in TMoP, Freud on

[Richard Ryan]

Very nice.  Is "denial" quite the right word for Dostoevsky's state of mind though?  His morning seems to have a manic intensity to it.  Everything - sex, politics, art - leads him to think of Pavel. 


--- On Sat, 9/27/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Subject: TMoP Chap 1: Grief in TMoP, Freud on
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Date: Saturday, September 27, 2008, 10:19 AM

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.









      

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