ABSTRACT
Writing about post-Communist political discourse twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and noting a strand that is turning from anticommunism to a sense of nostalgia for ‘the “good old days” of Communism’, Slavoj Zizek comments: ‘The nostalgia for communism shouldn’t be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to a grey Socialist reality, it is a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past’ (2009). What might it mean to interpret nostalgic political discourses in terms of psychical processes of mourning? Just how little or how much of a clinical psychoanalytic account of mourning might we be able to trace in this kind of analysis? In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud explains that mourning can take place in response to the loss of a loved person, but also in response to ‘the loss of some abstraction . . . such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (1957, p. 243). He suggests that in mourning: ‘Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it’ (p. 245). The fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe can, then, be understood as a loss that requires a period of mourning during which the subject might be expected to revisit different aspects of the lost object. Eventually, when this work of revisiting and detaching from the lost object is achieved, Freud suggests, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ (p. 245). Zizek’s interpretation implies that contemporary nostalgia for Communism should be understood as an instance of revisiting of memories of a lost object, and that this strand of political discourse will naturally be left behind when the process of mourning is completed. However, the intense and painful sorrow that is also associated with mourning is not directly apparent in Zizek’s example. For me, his interpretation is at once insightful and puzzling: insightful because it makes sense that the people who grew up under Communism need in some way to engage with the traces of the lost regime; and puzzling because I can’t quite work out what this interpretation leaves out, or what kinds of
accounts might add depth to an interpretation of nostalgic political discourse as a form of mourning for a lost aspect of national identity. How is Zizek’s speculative interpretation different from the interpretation of mourning in the clinical context? How is it similar? What principles are being used to distinguish this as an instance of mourning rather than melancholia? Is there additional data that might perhaps help to elaborate Zizek’s interpretation? Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia and Klein’s development of his ideas in her account of processes of mourning have provided an enormously productive structure for interpretation within both psychoanalysis and more sociologically orientated research. Adam Phillips explains:
Without mourning for primary objects there is no way out of the magic circle of the family. Indeed, partly through the work of Klein, mourning has provided the foundation for development in most versions of psychoanalysis; so much so, in fact, that mourning has acquired the status of a quasi-religious concept in psychoanalysis. Analysts believe in mourning; if a patient were to claim, as Emerson once did, that mourning was ‘shallow’ he or she would be considered to be ‘out of touch’ with something or other.
