From “Work of Mourning” to “Spectral Figurations”

This chapter addresses Freudian psychoanalysis’s potential and limitations in understanding the emotional implications of forced disappearances in Latin America. Disappeared people are neither dead nor alive, neither absent nor present. As such, classic conceptions of mourning do not adequately explain this particular phenomenon. Borrowing from recent scholarship on these topics, the chapter proposes that the notion of the specter provides both a more adequate understanding of the emotional implications of forced disappearances and a more flexible view of the distinction between mourning and melancholy.