In the Philosophy Chat column of the Catholic Peace Weekly, the philosophy professor offers some ideas on how to transform grief into healing after loss due to death.
We use the specific term ‘mourning’ when expressing sorrow over
In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates, facing death after his sentence, urges his weeping disciples to restrain their grief and allow him to meet death with dignity. Thus, sorrow has long been imprinted as a negative emotion to be suppressed, and the act of mourning, grieving, and remembering the dead has also been overlooked in its importance. However, in modern times, it has gained attention alongside a positive evaluation of emotions.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) understood mourning in “Mourning and Melancholia” as a psychological process of severing the sorrow arising from loss. Both mourning and melancholia signify a state of suffering from the loss of the beloved. While mourning is a psychological process of regaining a normal self by recognizing reality and detaching from attachment and fixation to the object causing the loss, melancholia refers to abnormal symptoms like self-deprecation, guilt, and delusions arising from the failure of normal mourning. While mourning naturally resolves over time, when the libido invested in the lost object is withdrawn (forgetting), regressive melancholia does not.
Unlike Freud, who distinguished successful normal mourning from failed pathological mourning, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) argued that success or failure cannot be applied to mourning. Above all, he emphasizes that the essence of mourning lies not in the passive, negative attitude of ‘forgetting’ but in the active, positive attitude of ‘remembering’. Its significance lies in the dead taking root within me through memory, allowing me to maintain a lasting relationship with them. Only through such mourning can the sense of loss be overcome. In other words, mourning is a dialectical process of synthesis: despite the sorrow and grief of losing the deceased, we do not forget them, but rather remember them. Through this ‘negation of negation,’ we form a positive new relationship with the dead.
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) also emphasizes that the catalyst for reversing the loss through absence lies in 'memory.' While forgetting makes the deceased vanish as if they had never existed, only memory can transcend the physical time of death and make the deceased present ‘here and now’. Therefore, even in cases like suicide, we must confront loss with a more active attitude, remembering the deceased. In fact, remembering and commemorating the deceased is precisely what affirms their existence.
