Mark Stafford

Ours

Mark STAFFORD

Freud invented an indispensable term, understanding of the relationship between nachträglich, to describe the relationship beinformation and misinformation, but also tween and our struggle to respond to that by the evident satisfaction that can be which was unforeseen. We are collectively yielded from transforming cultural reprebeing transformed by an experience that sentations into weaponry with which to has a multitude of dimensions, while at the intimidate and incite. For Freud, the forcsame time, the aftermath remains unknown. es of the cultural drive to create symbolic The substrate of anxiety is evident in all of systems that tolerate difference and foster our emotional responses to our varied exthe erotic appreciation of the Other were periences. Our social links and the instituopposed to the death drives that became tions and platforms that support them are instrumentalized in weapons that could vital in preserving the sense that our destiny kill indiscriminately. is, as it always is, entwined with the Other. When the generation of analysts who

The practice of listening to the unconlived through World War II and then the scious, of encountering the psychic apparathreat of the Cold War came to listen to tus of denial and censorship, reveals somethe effect of mass death on the psyche, they thing astonishing—each individual responds tended to turn to the agency of the ego, to the confrontation with their mortality, the limits of Michael Smith, Brooklyn 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 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)