eXP Ress MAY 2016

Volume 3 - Issue 2

Remembering &
Forgetting
Russell Grigg

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Precis

In this provocative and carefully constructed paper,

Russell Grigg’s reconsideration of both Freud’s and
Lacan’s notions of mourning and melancholia becomes
a further intervention in our understanding of these
terms. Grigg firstly challenges the accepted Freudian
notion that the work of mourning has an endpoint that
erases the lost object, and reminds us of Freud’s own
reconsiderations after the death of his daughter. Build-
ing on Lacan’s work, Grigg suggests the term “memo-
rialization,” a memorialization of the object, which
“entails leaving a record in the Other, the symbolic,
of the object’s disappearance.” Secondly, Grigg notes
the parallels between melancholia and psychosis. He
points out that Lacan’s notion of psychosis expanded
after his invention of the object a, from a focus on
invasive imaginary jouissance, a la Schreber, to a focus
on the immediate proximity of the real of the object,
and Grigg argues that this encounter with the real is
also what happens in melancholia. Memorialization,
he explains, is what aids the work of mourning through
a reconstruction of a phallic function that restores
the neurotic’s protection from the object a. However,
in melancholia the semblants that veil the real of the
object fall, so melancholia is not endless mourning, but
rather, an inescapable confrontation with the real.

Nancy Gillespie, Co-Editor

Volume 3 - Issue 2 May 2016

mourning each of the memories in which libido is
bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected
so that the libido can detach itself from it and the
ego can be “free and uninhibited again” at the end of
the process.1 I’ve argued against this claim: it is such
a manifestly untrue remark that I find it curious that
Freud should have made it. It is obvious to the most
casual observation that mourning always leaves traces

FORGETTING & behind, in the form of often painful memories of a

loved one. Even though the pain of the memories dulls
REMEMBERING with time, they remain liable to resurface at special
moments such as anniversaries, just as they can also
emerge in connection with the most unexpected things:
“What is ‘success’ in mourning? a movie, an item of clothing, a memory of a holiday, or
Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting?” even with a new love. A lost object rarely disappears
entirely; an object that was once loved and lost is prob-
Julian Barnes ably never abandoned without a trace. And yet, accord-
ing to Freud, mourning involves a process of abandon-
ment of one’s attachment to the memories of the lost
object and, as slow and painful as this process may be,
there will be a return to the status quo ante. In the
‘normal case,’ he says, there is a withdrawal of the libido
invested in the object and a reassignment to a new one.
It is only in the pathological case of melancholia that
What is mourning? What is it, really, that a person goes
the lost object remains, where, as he says, “the shadow
through when he or she loses someone they love, I mean
of the object fell upon the ego.”2 But even in normal
really loves?
mourning the lost object always casts its shadow upon
the ego. Even if it is true that the normal process of
And another question. What is it to mourn no longer?
mourning is over when one is free of the object’s hold
What state does the person who has loved and lost
and can live and love again, the ego never completely
find themselves in ‘at the end,’ when they have finally
loses the mark of the object that has been lost.
overcome their grief. When one can ‘get on with one’s
life,’ as they say? Is it that one has got over one’s loss? In
As it turns out, Freud does recognise that a lost love
a sense, yes, of course, one has got over one’s loss. But
object is in fact never completely abandoned and re-
if this means that one has forgotten the person one has
mains irreplaceable. Strangely, it took the tragic death
lost, then, no, the lost loved one is not forgotten. Even as
from Spanish influenza of Freud’s fifth child, Sophie, at
the pain of loss diminishes, so the memory remains.
the age of twenty-six in 1920 for Freud to realise this.
Indeed, he recognized that the reason for the continued
What I argue is that at the end of grieving the lost
attachment to the object that keeps the object alive –
person is not forgotten but commemorated. And it’s this
that memorialises it, as it were – is the very love for the
commemoration that I want to speak of.
object itself. On February 4th of that same year, 1920,
Freud says something very odd about mourning in he wrote to Ferenczi of his “insurmountable narcissistic
his classic paper on the topic. You know the thesis: in insult.” 3 Then, some nine years later on April 11, 1929,

1. S. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition 14: 245. 3. Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch,
eds. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi vol. 3,
2. “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition 14: 249.
1920–1933 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7.

Volume 3 - Issue 2 May 2016

in a letter consoling Ludwig Binswanger who had un- Julian Barnes gives eloquent expression to the dilemma
dergone a similar loss, Freud wrote, “We know that the of the griever: What is ‘success’ in mourning, he asks?
acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting?
but also that we will remain inconsolable, and will never
find a substitute. No matter what may come to take its Clearly, the griever sees their mourning in moral terms.
place, even should it fill that place completely, it remains When we mourn we are not just narcissistically pained
something else. And that is how it should be. It is the by our loss, which is the “narcissistic wound” Freud
only way of perpetuating a love that we do not want to refers to, but we also have a moral attachment—a com-
abandon.”4 mitment, if you will—to the memory of the person
who has gone. What sort of a commitment is it? Well,
“And that is how it should be,” writes Freud. The as we say, we have a commitment to their memory.
mourning does not and should not bring an end to the We have a commitment to memorializing the object
object’s presence in one’s life. The process of mourning we have loved, and this memorialization requires an
a lost object can go hand in hand with a persistent drive inscription, of some kind, in the symbolic. The memo-
to memorialize the lost person and one’s relationship to rialization of what is lost entails leaving a record in the
him or her. It is as if, out of respect for the person and Other, the symbolic, of the object’s disappearance. And
one’s attachment to him or her, one is bent on main- because it is registered in the Other, it is crucial that
taining the memory of one’s attachment to the object this record be both public and private, both material
so that the object itself somehow outlives the psychical and psychical. As I argued at the APW two years ago,
work of mourning. This commemoration, carrying the mourning is every bit as much about public ritual and
memory of others, is a fundamental feature of mourn- commemoration as about internal psychical work.
ing and loss. As Goethe is said to have written, “We die
twice: first when we die and then when those who knew While there are obvious narcissistic components to the
and loved us die,” (irony of Goethe the exception) and process of mourning, where the mourner can become
it is as living memorials that we carry the mark of lost self-obsessed and fixated on his loss, we judge this
loved ones on our souls. morally. Again, I quote Barnes:

When the mourning is over, the object is still preserved Look how much I loved him/her and with these my tears I
prove it.
in some way; and this is as it should be. As more or less
distressful as the persistent memory of a lost loved one Look how much I suffer, how much others fail to under-
stand: does this not prove how much I loved?
may be, there may be no question for the person who
Maybe, maybe not.5
has suffered a loss to want to forget his loss. Moreover,
the sadness, the regret, and the pain experienced over a I have proposed that mourning is not so much about
loss can be experienced without having any impact upon forgetting as it is about remembering. We can now add
the person’s self-regard. One’s life may be impoverished that mourning seems to be about finding the right way
by the loss of a loved one, but without one’s sense of to remember. Or, as I would prefer, the right way to
one’s own worth being diminished. commemorate.

Mourning gives expression to an important push to The rituals of mourning are part of, are essential to, the
memorialization as an expression of respect for the dead ‘right’ way to commemorate. The rituals of mourning
demanded of and by the bereaved, those who loved are so important that the noun ‘mourner’ does not refer
and have, in a sense, been left behind by the death of a to a person’s grief, or at least does so only indirectly. A
friend or loved one. ‘mourner’ is first and foremost someone performing

4. Gerhard Fichtner, ed. The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger cor- 5. Julian Barnes, Levels of Life (NY: Random House, 2013), 113.
respondence, 1908-1938 (London: Open Gate Press, 2003), 196. My
emphasis.

Volume 3 - Issue 12 May 2016

a ritual. She is someone who attends a funeral or who loss of a loved one, a hole opens up in the real such that
is said to be ‘in mourning,’ frequently in a way that is the subject enters into a relationship that is the inverse
prescribed either by religious law or popular custom. of . . . Verwerfung”. Clarifying this, Lacan adds that this
Mourning can mean wearing black; it can last for two hole in the Real “sets in motion . . . the signifier that can
weeks or forty days, where the period of mourning is only be purchased with your own flesh and your own
frequently calculated to the day. In some cultures, it is blood, the signifier that is essentially the veiled phal-
even possible to employ professional mourners to make lus.”7 The suggestion here, then, seems to be that the
a public demonstration of grief to honor the deceased. breach in reality created by the loss of a loved one sets
In any case, the practice of mourning is less an indica- in train, in the reverse direction, the process typically
tion of the extent of a person’s grief than a ritual that is involved in the triggering of a psychosis. Instead of the
more or less correctly carried out as a mark of respect calamitous collapse, as in psychosis, of signifiers that re-
for the deceased. Again, even where the practice of veal the absence of the Name-of-the-Father, in mourn-
mourning is not clearly circumscribed, there are still ing, the loss unconsciously activates afresh phallic signi-
considerations of propriety that bear on the activities fiers that libidinally bind one to the love object. This
associated with mourning. As Hamlet sarcastically puts explains why in mourning the memories of the lost ob-
it, “Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats / ject become so vivid, why everything reminds one of the
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”6 lost object, or why it fills one’s dreams. Thus, whereas
Freud took the approach that the work of mourning is
But what about the internal work of mourning, the a process of relinquishing the features of the object one
psychical work that a griever undergoes? How are we to by one, slowly and painstakingly, Lacan here regards the
understand the psychical process of mourning? Freud’s process as one of the preservation of the object by con-
account won’t do because it is about forgetting, with- structing a memorial to it in the symbolic.
drawal of cathexis and reinvestment in a new object – a
view which he himself subsequently abandons, even I think that the mechanism of mourning looks more or
if only implicitly, when he refers to the death of his less like this: the work of mourning consists of codify-
daughter Sophie and the ethical requirement not to ing imaginary features of the object, i(a), into signifiers
forget. lodged in the Other. The painful process of mourning
stems from the fall of the semblants that love and desire
Let’s think about mourning in terms of memorialising. attach us to, as Freud taught us; but – and this is what
First, it needs to be based on memorialising in the right Freud did not capture – the work of mourning is the
way. As Lacan says in the discussion of Hamlet in Désir transformation of these semblants into signifiers regis-
et son interprétation, Hamlet’s father is not yet dead tered in and endorsed by the Other. It is the combina-
and walks the stage restlessly at night precisely because tion of ritual as a community event – funerals, mourn-
he has not been properly memorialised – where, in an ing practices, etc. – with the individual’s psychical work
era when the values of honour and nobility prevailed, of mourning that achieves this commemoration. Identi-
avenging his murder was essential to proper memoriali- fication with the lost object, or rather with traits of the
sation. I’ll come back to this question of the ‘right way.’ lost object, are a part and part only of this process.
For the moment, let’s say something about the mecha-
nism of mourning. This is not the whole story about mourning, which
also contains a real dimension involving the subject’s
In chapter 18, “Mourning and desire”, Lacan briefly relation to the objet a. In mourning, the painful loss
comments that mourning is like the inverse of Verwer- of one’s semblants exposes the underlying object a, the
fung. More precisely, he says that with the grief over the cause of one’s desire and the object that one has put in

6. Hamlet act 1, scene 2, lines 179-180. 7. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire VI: Le désir et son interprétation, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris : La Martinière, 2013), 397.

Volume 3 - Issue 2 May 2016

place to support one’s castration. This is the exposure subtracting it from the subject in the process. This sub-
to the real of the object a, or at least a particular aspect traction of jouissance, which we write as ( - ), takes
of it, which is ordinarily hidden by the object’s ideal place at the level of libido and the drive. Now, because
features. Hidden in mourning, but manifest in melan- in psychosis the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, the
cholia. possibility opens up of an excess of imaginary jouis-
sance that is both unregulated and invasive. The disar-
We are familiar with this process in our analytic experi- ray and confusion that Schreber, for instance, initially
ence where the end of analysis is akin to this process, finds himself in is accompanied by invasive imaginary
albeit in attenuated form. This is the ‘slow burn’ that jouissance. Then, over the course of his psychosis, he
constitutes analysis, which I have spoken about else- discovers a new way of regulating his jouissance, which
where. Melanie Klein recognised this as a form of involves constructing a new relationship to the world,
mourning. Recasting Klein, it is possible, then, to think which emerges with his delusional metaphor.
of the progress of an analysis as sort of non-traumatic
traumatisation, or, if you wish, as a controlled decline of The stability of Schreber’s paranoid delusion contrasts
the imaginary. In analysis the fall of semblants results, with the earlier phase of the disorder when the excess
not from the slings and arrows of misfortune; rather, the of jouissance simply overwhelms him. In his “On a
fall of semblants results, slowly, and in a way regulated Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of Psycho-
by interpretation, from the analysis itself. This of course sis,” Lacan describes the early confusional period of the
makes analysis a process that has less to do with the psychosis as the “subject’s regression – a topographical,
healing of wounds, the recuperation of the subject’s not a genetic regression – to the mirror stage,” wherein
identity, or a return to the status quo ante in such cases. the relationship to “the specular other is reduced here
Interpretation, and indeed the process of analysis itself, to its mortal impact.”8 Schreber’s voices, for instance,
are less brutal means of dissolving the artefacts with speak of him as a “leper corpse leading another leper
which the individual’s narcissism is surrounded. And a corpse”; and his body is merely “an aggregate of colo-
gentle awakening, a slow trauma, as when we say a ‘slow nies of foreign ‘nerves,’ a sort of dump for detached
burn,’ that is calculated and ratified by the subject, is fragments of his persecutors’ identities.”9 Lacan’s analy-
undoubtedly more beneficial than the unforeseen crisis sis is in terms of the distinction between the Imaginary
apt to result from the sadism or cynicism of the Other. and the Symbolic. The mortification in question is the
result of the structural regression to the imaginary re-
Incidentally, this is where the essential difference be- lationship. The object in the Real plays no part.
tween melancholia and mourning lies. In the exposure
to the real of the object a, the melancholic subject turns One could speculate that if Lacan had written this text
out to be defenceless against the object. The object can- post 1964 instead of in 1958, he would have invoked
not be memorialized, as it can be in mourning, but in- the role object a has to play. He would have referred
stead remains there forever in the Real. The collapse of the mortiferous role to the object, not to a regression
semblants that otherwise veil the object persists, and the to the Imaginary. And he would have distinguished
‘grimace’ of the object, like the grimace of a skull behind between the collapse of phallic signification, “0 ” in
a beautiful face, is exposed; for the melancholic, the veil Schema I, and the unmediated presence of object a.
of semblants, the i(a), over the object a falls altogether. In a 1967 address by Lacan to a meeting of psychia-
trists at the Sainte Anne Hospital, as part of a series of
Can we understand melancholia as a psychotic process? lectures under the auspices of his friend Henri Ey, we
I believe so. An account might look something like
this. The symbolic order regulates imaginary jouissance,

8. Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of 9. “On a Question Prior”, op. cit. 473.
Psychosis,” in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce
Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York,
London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006) 473. My emphasis.

Volume 3 - Issue 2 May 2016

find this comment: it is in paranoia, or abject-making, as in melancholia.
It is the free men, the truly free men, who are mad.
There is no demand for the petit a, he holds it, it is Thus, when Freud proceeds by comparing and con-
what he calls his voices, for instance. [ . . .] He does not cling trasting mourning and melancholia, it is a little
to the locus of the Other, the big Other, through misleading. The melancholic suffers not from eternal
the object a, he has it at his disposal. [ . . .] Let’s say
that he has his cause in his pocket, and that is why he mourning but from an inescapable proximity to the
is mad.10 object in the Real. In neurosis there is a phallic presen-
tation of the object and its semblants, while in melan-
The proximity of the object a in psychosis means that cholia, the encounter with the real object is at stake.
the subject has not separated himself from it as the ob-
ject cause of desire. This separation, which for the neu- To return to dreams and trauma after a long detour
rotic subject is produced by the Other as locus of speech via the object in the real, present in mourning and
and language, both regulates and limits his jouissance. melancholia, let me refer you to Lacan’s discussion of
In the absence of this separation a plenitude of jouis- the dream reported by Freud in the Traumdeutung,
sance is apparent in such typical psychotic formations “Father, don’t you see I am burning.” Lacan’s genius
as erotomania, hypochondriasis, and the persecutions is to demonstrate the traumatic element at the heart
characteristic of paranoia, as well as the feminization of of the dream by taking the very example that Freud
the psychotic subject, or what Lacan calls the ‘pousse- had given to illustrate the claim that dreams are the
à-la-femme’ we find in many transsexuals, with their guardian of sleep. As Lacan demonstrates, at the heart
unbridgeable certainty and sometimes persistent pursuit of the primary process “we see preserved the insistence
of surgical interventions to better approximate their re- of the trauma in making us aware of its existence.”11
semblance to their particular ideal of femininity. And then, “the reality system [. . . ] leaves an essential
part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the web
In melancholia we encounter the same failure of separa- of the pleasure principle.”12 In this preservation of the
tion from the object. The depressive function is ex- insistence of the trauma we can detect the link with
plained by the fact that the unseparated-off object, in memorialisation that I have been arguing for, whether
being a ‘piece of the real,’ (‘un bout de réel,’ as Lacan says) there in the dream’s traumatic repetition, or there in
leaves the subject exposed and defenseless to its ravages. the memorialisation in mourning, or there in the failed
A comparison with paranoia might help: the paranoiac memorialisation of the object in melancholia.
is prey to the evil Other who wishes him ill; the melan-
cholic is likewise defenseless against the Real of a hor-
rific object, unmediated by the Symbolic.

Lacan talks of melancholia very rarely and does not of-

fer much of an account of affective or passional psycho-
ses, despite Clérambault’s attention to it. I think we can
understand melancholia in these terms: while the neu-
rotic’s access to a libidinal object is via its semblants, in
melancholia the veil of semblants falls from the object,
leaving the melancholic exposed to the object in the real
and at its mercy. This object can be either persecutory, as

10. Jacques Lacan, “La formation du psychiatre et la psychanalyse”, 10 12. Seminar XI, op. cit. 55. Translation modified.
November 1967, www.ecole-lacanienne.net/documents/1967- 11-10.doc

11. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1977), 55.

Volume 3 - Issue 2 May 2016

eXP Ress

The LCEXPRESS is produced and distributed by

Maria-Cristina Aguirre, Editor

Nancy Gillespie, Co-Editor
Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, Advisor
Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff, Designer

The Lacanian Compass is a group dedicated to the development

and promotion of the Lacanian Orientation of Psychoanalysis in
the United States, psychoanalysis as first described by Sigmund
Freud and further elaborated by Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain
Miller.

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