TMoP Chap 1: Grief in TMoP, Freud on

[Mark Kohut]

I think you are correct; 'denial' is not the right (or only) word...but, I think the phenomenology of "blocked mourning"; willed non-mourning?---or whatever is the right phrase--is accurate and subtler than I can label in Coetzee...there is some desperate [manic], barely controlled desire for Life--the life force ala Freud?.....as in that admitted sexual desire for the landlady. (almost a rape fantasy?)

Misc. personal: someone, male, once told me of how much he wanted sex for days-with his wife--after his father died....like life vs. death...

"Denial (also called abnegation) is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. [1] The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimisation) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference). The concept of denial is particularly important to the study of addiction. The theory of denial was first researched seriously by Anna Freud."---wikipedia, there's more.







--- On Sat, 9/27/08, Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: TMoP Chap 1: Grief in TMoP, Freud on
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>, markekohut at yahoo.com
> Date: Saturday, September 27, 2008, 12:48 PM
> 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.