TMoP Chap 1: Grief in TMoP, Freud on

[Bekah]

Dostoevsky's son only died days before his arrival in Petersburg.   I  
think "shock" would be an appropriate word.  There are various  
approaches these days to the grief process but one of the original  
popular ones was developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969.  She had  
5 stages - denial (this can't be happening),  shock,  (NO!),   
bargaining,  (also known as 'magical thinking'),  pure-d sadness (the  
pain of mourning),  and acceptance - we go on.    Other researchers  
have other stages.

Joan Didion did a pretty good job of it in "My Year of Magical  
Thinking."

I see  denial, shock and magical thinking in Coetzee's Dostoevsky.

Bekah



On Sep 27, 2008, at 3:11 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> 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.
>
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> --- 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.
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