ABSTRACT
I launched into a discussion of death, grief and mourning in Chapter 2 because it seemed to me to highlight, in a startling manner, the way in which psychotherapy is implicated in producing an easy, ‘optimistic’ and, I think, rather glib view of life in late modernity. It is also, I believe, an essential key to what might be called the false self of late modernity, the sort of self that our contemporary society seems to require of us. Grief and mourning involve taking something inside, but not in order to be ‘full up’, to achieve emotional satisfaction. Rather they involve loss in the outside world and for a while at least they emphasise internal loss, internal inadequacy; our confusions and conflicts are emphasised. This tends to be hidden in our contemporary conceptions: cathartic release-grief, anger-is emphasised and of course cathartic release brings temporary satisfaction, a temporary filling. The complexity and conflicts of the psyche are denied and instead there is the offer of a fuller and more creative life at the end of the process. The mapping of mourning can, at the extreme, be considered a training in how to avoid the work by a deployment of cathartic release and manic defence. This means that it is difficult for an inner world to develop.
