Death and the City: On Loss, Mourning, and Melancholia at Work

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Organisational collapse is part of our vernacular. Enron, Woolworths, Lehman’s, Bank of America, Rover, BOAC, Northern Rock – these failures are part of our cultural experience of work. At a time when working lives are often vulnerable and organisational mortality is under threat from technology and the economy the consequences of organizational death are worthy of attention.

Organisations can face many different endings – sharp and brutal, premature, or carefully planned and premeditated – all these endings have emotional collateral damage. We are working in an environment where crises, failure, and demise are everyday features. Closure, merger, downsizing, redundancy, liquidation, insolvency, administration – this is the dialect of organizational life in a recession driven economy. Such vulnerability at work creates challenges for decision making, operational and communication delivery, as well as the loss and suffering of individuals involved.

Death and the City provides an in-depth portrait of an organisation in a palliative state. It transports the analytic concepts of mourning and melancholia and of the death drive into the workplace, and brings this important, but under explored, stream of psychoanalytic thought to the fore as a means of interrogating and further understanding organisational life.

The reader will gain an understanding of the experience and catastrophe of loss in the context of the global financial crisis. The pain of a slow corporate death and the acceptance of failure will be illuminated using psychoanalytic theory helpful to consultants and academics dealing with endings. This book offers an original and in-depth understanding of organisational closure, the inner world of the organisation seen through the inner world of the researcher.

Death deserves contemplation at a time when organisations are experiencing more exposure to endings than at any time in the last century. The book applies insights from psychoanalysis to provide a deeper awareness and understanding of the experience of these endings.

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Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning

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This book aims to question the junctions of the private and the public when it comes to trauma, loss, and the work of mourning - notions which, it is argued, challenge our very ideas of the individual and the shared. It asks, to paraphrase Adorno, 'What do we mean by "working through the past"?, 'How is a shared work of mourning to be understood?', and 'With what legitimacy do we consider a particular social or cultural practice to be “mourning”?' Rather than aiming to present a diagnosis of the political present, this volume instead takes one step back to pose the question of what mourning might mean and what its social dimension consists in. Contributors reflect on the trauma of the Holocaust, the after-effects of the Vietnam War in the US, the Lebanese war-torn experience, victims of the Pacific War in Taiwan, and the Chilean dictatorship.

Bereavement: Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections

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This is a book about death, loss, grief and mourning, but with an unusual twist. It is different in that it explores specific kinds of deaths encountered within families and households, rather than general concepts of mourning. It is even more unusual because here six psychoanalysts reveal how they have suffered, processed, and survived losses in their own lives; at the same time bringing clinical and theoretical perspectives of various psychoanalytic schools to bear on their own, as well as others’, experiences.

The narratives in this book use the power of subjective experience, as described by psychoanalysts themselves, to understand, contextualize, and extend existing clinical approaches. Each chapter addresses the death of a different loved one. The losses discussed include death of a mother, death of a father, death of a sibling, death of a spouse, death of a child, and death of a pet (recognizing the deep significance of pets in human households). These accounts are bookended by a chapter reviewing the spectrum of emotional reactions to death and current ideas of grief and mourning, and a chapter weaving together the many narratives as well as exploring some additional situations and ideas.

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“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

― Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia"

Here you can download Freud's essay Mourning and Melancholia.

In this essay, Freud argues that mourning and melancholia are similar but different responses to loss. In mourning, a person deals with the grief of losing of a specific love object, and this process takes place in the conscious mind. In melancholia, a person grieves for a loss he is unable to fully comprehend or identify, and thus this process takes place in the unconscious mind. Mourning is considered a healthy and natural process of grieving a loss, while melancholia is considered pathological.

See also:

The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader

On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

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Both melancholia and mourning are triggered by the same thing, that is, by loss. The distinction often made is that mourning occurs after the death of a loved one while in melancholia the object of love does not qualify as irretrievably lost. Contributors: Carlos Mario Aslan, Martin Bergmann, Roosevelt M. S. Cassorla, Florence Guignard, Mar¡a Cristina Melgar, Thomas H. Ogden, Mar¡a Lucila Pelento, Jean-Michel Quinodoz, Priscilla Roth, Vamik D. Volkan

See also:

The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader

Attachment-Informed Grief Therapy: The Clinician's Guide to Foundations and Applications

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Attachment-Informed Grief Therapy bridges the fields of attachment studies and thanatology, uniting theory, research, and practice to enrich our understanding of how and why people grieve and how we can help the bereaved. In its pages, clinicians and students will gain a new understanding of the etiology of complicated grief and its treatment and will become better equipped to formulate accurate and specific case conceptualization and treatment plans. The authors also illustrate the ways in which the therapeutic relationship is a crucially important―though largely unrecognized―element in grief therapy, and offer guidelines for an attachment informed view of the therapeutic relationship that can serve as the foundation of all grief therapy.

New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning

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Honoring the centennial of Sigmund Freud’s seminal paper Mourning and Melancholia, New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning is a major contribution to our culture’s changing view of bereavement and mourning, identifying flaws in old models and offering a new, valid and effective approach.

George Hagman and his fellow contributors bring together key psychoanalytic texts from the past 20 years, exploring contemporary research, clinical practice and model building relating to the problems of bereavement, mourning and grief. They propose changes to the asocial, intra-psychic nature of the standard analytic model of mourning, changes compatible with contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Arguing that the most important goal of mourning is often to preserve, rather than give up the relationship to the deceased, this book provides a more positive, hopeful model. Crucially, it emphasizes the importance of mourning together, rather than alone.

New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning will be the go-to resource for researchers, clinicians and interested lay people seeking a clear, accessible overview of contemporary mourning theory, useful in their daily lives and in clinical practice. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, grief counsellors, as well teachers, undergraduates and advanced students studying in the field.

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanlysis

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Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time, while acknowledging, witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past.

Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Ghosts in the Consulting Room features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways that surprise both patient and therapist. In the book, distinguished psychoanalysts examine how to work with a variety of ‘ghosts’, as they manifest in transference and countertransference, in work with children and adults, in institutional settings and even in the very founders and foundations of the field of psychoanalysis itself. They explore the dilemma of how to process loss when it is unspeakable and unknowable, often manifesting in silence or gaps in knowledge, and living in strange relations to time and space.

This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.

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Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity

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Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means of transcending grief.

The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor Adele Tutter’s Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor Léon Wurmser’s Epilogue closes the volume.

Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity.

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Life After Loss: The Lessons of Grief

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This book is a comprehensive guide to the mourning process by a world-recognized authority on grief. How we cope with grief and come to terms with the death of a loved one shapes our world. Dr Volkan shows how each mourning is as individualized as our fingerprints, encoded with our past history of losses. Anecdotal and compassionate, this is a profoundly moving and informative study of how grief and loss shape all our lives.

The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader

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The New Black is Darian Leader's compassionate and illuminating exploration of melancholy

What happens when we lose someone we love? A death, a separation or the break-up of a relationship are some of the hardest times we have to live through. We may fall into a nightmare of depression, lose the will to live and see no hope for the future. What matters at this crucial point is whether or not we are able to mourn.

In this important and groundbreaking book, acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Darian Leader urges us to look beyond the catch-all concept of depression to explore the deeper, unconscious ways in which we respond to the experience of loss. In so doing, we can loosen the grip it may have upon our lives.

Also by Darian Leader:

• On the Marketing of Depression

• What is Madness?

• Why do women write more letters than they post?

• Why Do People Get Ill?: Exploring the Mind-body Connection

• Strictly Bipolar

• Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide