On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia

This is a collection of essays by Sigmund Freud, the bulk of it Totem and Taboo, with “Mourning and Melancholia” the other important piece; the remaining works, like “Why War?” and “Transience,” offer brief reflections but matter much less. Totem and Taboo is one of Freud’s most important texts, and it leans heavily on the anthropological literature of his day. Most of it is a meandering analysis of what other scholars had said about “totems” — protective objects representing some animal or being a community must protect — and “taboos,” social norms about behavior that is wholly forbidden for religious reasons. Freud’s own contribution is to add neurosis to the picture: magic, for instance, is a psychic phenomenon, and as he puts it, “neurosis is characterized by the fact that neurotics elevate psychical reality above factual reality, and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do to realities.”

To make sense of that, you have to recall his argument in The Interpretation of Dreams: that we don’t only dream while asleep, we dream all the time. Our lives are not unfiltered reality; they’re modified by the unconscious, which runs on the same hardware awake as asleep. The neurotic, on this view, experiences a reality more heavily shaped by mental processes than the “normal” person does — though “normal” is itself a questionable category. Totem and Taboo is also where Freud speculatively floats the idea that morality originates in a band of brothers killing their father, leaving us with a guilt we then project as “the father” onto the world. I still can’t quite grasp how Freud builds so much argument on speculation like this, but it’s interesting, and the insight that matters to me is that we somehow project our inner compass outward, and that this defines how we see the world.

There’s a lot to dislike, too. Freud follows the early-twentieth-century understanding of the “development” of religion as: Primitive Religion → Polytheistic Religion → Monotheistic Religion → Scientific Worldview. It’s a classically modernist metanarrative, and it doesn’t hold weight. Even so, Totem and Taboo is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of Freud. The other important piece is “Mourning and Melancholia,” which has drawn more attention in recent decades thanks to Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholy” and Enzo Traverso’s book of the same name. Mourning is the normal response to losing the object of one’s desire; melancholia is pathological because it’s so often unconscious — one doesn’t even know one had desired the person or thing, and the loss is subsumed entirely into the unconscious. When I left my PhD last summer, I suffered heavily, and I couldn’t figure out why until, after a few weeks, I realized I was grieving. The PhD had been the object of my desire, my driving force, and losing it threw me into a deep depression — the same way leftists who have lost the possibility of a communist future fall into a widespread left melancholia. To overcome melancholia, you have to reflect seriously on why you suffer so much; left unconscious, the suffering simply continues.