Mourning, Melancholia, and the Palestinians
Robert Pois, University of Denver and Paul Elovitz, Ramapo College and the Psychohistory Forum
How will our nation mourn the terrible events of September 11, 2001? What are the consequences of a failure to mourn losses? What is the role of war in mourning collective tragedy? As Americans, historians of modern European history, and psychohistorians, we have decided to reflect upon the issue of mourning and how it relates to a major event of our lives. This brief article will provide more historical insight and more questions than answers but a historical perspective is vital to understanding these important questions.
In a truly insightful work on the impact of the Great War upon the German home front, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939 (1984),Robert Weldon Whalen makes use of Sigmund Freud’s differentiation between mourning and melancholia. Mourning, on both personal and national levels, means acceptance of loss and a willingness to go beyond it. It was naive, Freud thought, to believe that one could really end one’s occasional ruminating about this. The term “closure,” so much a part of today’s psychological lexicon, would have been rather strange for him to use in this context. Yet, Freud did believe that a period of mourning, varying in length with the individuals involved and appropriate to familial and personal circumstances, was healthy. It enabled one to accept the reality of death.
Melancholia, on the other hand, results from an inability to accept loss. This failure may stem from a variety of reasons but in the end it revolves around an inability or unwillingness to accept the loss of an individual with whom one has unresolved issues. It may involve an unwillingness to accept the degree of emotional investment one has had in an individual resulting in a sense of frustration or betrayal. For Whalen, one of the primary reasons for the sort of outrage generated by Germany’s defeat in the Great War and the imposition, as many Germans saw it, of an unwelcome republic, was an inability of Germans to accept defeat in a war in whose outcome they had invested so much effort. Obviously, individual German families could and did experience individual losses just as did families in France or Great Britain. But, loss on a national basis was difficult for many Germans to assimilate; for some, it proved to be impossible. Millions of Germans were not emotionally prepared to accept the reality of defeat. This was partly because throughout the war their armies occupied territories of France and Belgium and to the east the Russians accepted defeat in the humiliating Treaty of Brest Litovsk. For these Germans too much national blood had been spilled, too much energy had been expended, and too much lebensraum (room for living, feeding) lost, for the cause to be lost. Many blamed Jews, Communists, and the democratic Weimar Republic for the disastrous, unexpected outcome of the war and the humiliating elements in the Treaty of Versailles. Nazism was only one of many movements seeking to avoid the work of mourning and healing by focusing on the sense of betrayal. The Nazi focus on the dead of World War I, so dramatically portrayed in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1934), represented a commitment to vengeance -- future war and future deaths -- rather than a willingness to truly mourn and move on with the issues of life. In short, since loss was not accepted on the national level, mature mourning was avoided and the emotional and military issues would be replayed in World War II with disastrous consequences for Europe.
While reeling from the shock of the terrorism of September 11, Americans held many funereal ceremonies at Yankee Stadium, at Ground Zero, at sporting events, and even at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The media, politicians, and public focused on extremely public funerals, interviews of survivors, and memorials. As of February 2002, The New York Times is still running individual obituaries of the close to 3000 people who died in the World Trade Center. While such memorials may contribute to the mourning process, they may not necessarily have this effect. Irene Javors, in a personal communication, maintains “that this ‘spectacle of death’ functions as a defense against experiencing those nasty real feelings of terror in the face of loss. By going to the funerals of people we do not know, we allow ourselves to go through a sort of pantomime of grief once removed … while tricking ourselves into believing we are really feeling all this pain and loss.” As a grief specialist and psychotherapist “trained to ask myself, what lies beneath what is being stated….” she remains unclear as to what is happening. As scholars of the emotional life of nations, we need to understand far more about the implications of such rituals to the societal working through of grief and the restoration of a healthy optimism regarding life.
The mourning process was greatly complicated by the "declaration of war" by our President immediately after the event. Several weeks after the tragic events of September 11, his chief political strategist, Carl Rove, reported on C-Span cable television, that as soon as President Bush learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, even before he knew anything about who the perpetrators were, he declared that “we are at war.” However necessary many of the activities associated with the War on Terrorism may be to avert future terrorism, the focus on enemies distracts from the processes of collective and individual mourning.
The economic recession in America was deepened by the uncertainty following September 11 and the depressed feelings experienced by so many whose sense of security is badly shaken. People in mourning, without the focus of an identifiable, defined enemy who can be fought and brought to heel, as was Japan after Pearl Harbor, are not inclined to create an economic expansion. Part of the national agenda needs to be the mourning of not only America’s dead but also of America’s sense of invulnerability and security. Defeating the Taliban restored some sense of U.S. power at home and in the world but it only partially eliminated the future danger of terrorism because Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network operated successfully in the Sudan and elsewhere before it ever went to Afghanistan. Furthermore, America's every military and diplomatic action in a worldwide war against terrorism may refocus terrorists on the United States rather than on their local government.
An important factor in inflaming the al-Qaeda terrorists was hatred for United States support of Israel and concern for the Palestinians. Even if Osama bin Laden’s primary target is the United States, the passions aroused by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have been important in rallying support in the Middle East to his actions. Though the world was overwhelmingly repulsed by the collapse of the World Trade Center, televised images of Palestinians thanking Allah, cheering and dancing in the streets, reveal the depth of hatred towards the United States in most Arab societies. These Palestinians, who have suffered so many losses of their own, have felt no compelling need to accept their loss as permanent, and, thus, no real reason to mourn on a collective level. With so many Palestinians crammed into refugee camps where hatred is the dominant emotion, the dispossessed and their supporters have felt no need to accept comprise or defeat. Indeed, to their mind there has been no defeat, only a series of betrayals and temporary setbacks.
The inability of Weimar Germans to mourn on a national scale has been replicated by Palestinians for whom true mourning would be emblematic of accepting the existence of Israel and, therefore, defeat. Indeed, as in the case of Weimar-period Germans, the failure to accept the end of war led to the renewal of war. Let us hope that the United States can be vigilant in combating terrorism, while actually mourning our dead and loss of security. Otherwise, a cycle of violence based upon unresolved grief is more likely to continue.
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