DISEASE
Ours
Mark STAFFORD
understanding of the relationship between Freud invented an indispensable term, information and misinformation, but also nachträglich, to describe the relationship beby the evident satisfaction that can be tween and our struggle to respond to that yielded from transforming cultural reprewhich was unforeseen. We are collectively sentations into weaponry with which to being transformed by an experience that intimidate and incite. For Freud, the forchas a multitude of dimensions, while at the es of the cultural drive to create symbolic same time, the aftermath remains unknown. systems that tolerate difference and foster The substrate of anxiety is evident in all of the erotic appreciation of the Other were our emotional responses to our varied exopposed to the death drives that became periences. Our social links and the instituinstrumentalized in weapons that could tions and platforms that support them are kill indiscriminately. vital in preserving the sense that our destiny When the generation of analysts who is, as it always is, entwined with the Other. lived through World War II and then the The practice of listening to the unconthreat of the Cold War came to listen to scious, of encountering the psychic apparathe effect of mass death on the psyche, they tus of denial and censorship, reveals sometended to turn to the agency of the ego, thing astonishing—each individual responds to the confrontation with Michael Smith, Brooklyn their mortality, the limits of existence, in a singular way. The one element of consistency is our dependency on the fantasms with which we have framed our earliest experiences of vulnerability. Freud’s often praised essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915/1957) might be translated for this moment along the lines of “Thoughts in a Time of Collective Vulnerability.” Many of Freud’s insights in that essay remain pertinent to this new and different time of war and death. Perhaps with such a confrontation with death as the COVID-19 pandemic has produced, we can reassess the subtlety of Freud’s reflection on the place of death in human experience. From his concern for losing his sons, he forged a meditation on the psychic pain that occurs when the scale of death becomes incomprehensible and impossible to mourn. In our moment, we are experiencing the unprecedented consequences of trying to make sense of social links during an explosion, an air raid of information. Our society requires such social links provided by texts, discourses, and visual narratives, but their psychic value is being destroyed as quickly as they are created. They are often destroyed as a consequence of a lack of 28
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SUMMER 2020
whose experience of weakness led to an appeal to authoritarian social order. No doubt, this belief is that the ego is the best defense of the subject. We even see that thinking in the demands of those in power, who believe that they are the strongest because they have completely defended themselves against the social reality in which they live. As analysts, we must sustain the agency of another part of our psyche—the agency of the unconscious, which supports our desire and is in search of the desire of the Other—in whose fate we are intertwined. z REFERENCES Freud, S. (1957). Thoughts for the times on war and death. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 14, pp.273-300). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915)
