KINSHIP AND NACHTRÄGLICHKEIT

Abstract: In my practice, I often say to patients and supervisees, “what isn’t processed in the psyche is expressed in the body and in action”. But, in what ways is this psychic processing different to or related to expression in the body and in action? How do we move between these levels? I argue that a way of meaning is bound to particular words. If once bound, sometimes, in hearing differently, it unbinds. In what ways do we work with binding and unbinding in the process of analysis? Binding and unbinding, as process, is played out in identification, as Freud argues in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Both Laplanche and Abraham and Torok, drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, give us helpful ways to think about the difference between a focus on identities and a focus on identification as process. This is very useful when thinking about our work with bereaved and traumatised patients. And, for me, it is James Baldwin who best describes this kind of mourning identification in beautiful, sometimes harrowing, prose.