At the beginning of October, my wife and I were trekking in Europe. Not as fit (or young …) as we used to be, the trek took its toll. But the effort, even the aches and pains, felt pertinent, connecting body and mind, past and present and perhaps even some future awaiting ahead,
Saturday morning. October 7th. We woke up to a first stream – soon to become a deluge – of horrific news from home. An unprecedented number and pace of sirens, rockets and missiles, and then the rumors, soon to become facts, of Hamas terrorists – thousands of them – crossing the border, rampaging communities near the border and a music festival – murdering hundreds, slaughtering babies, raping, savagely mutilating women, men and children.
It was impossible to grasp. There were no words. Not a thought to cling to. We were, no doubt, in a state of shock, though even that obvious fact was far from awareness. In retrospect, it seems our psyche’s major effort was to magically erase what we were hearing, to make it go away. We had become hostages in the kingdom of dissociation.
Two weeks later I was sitting in a hotel in Eilat, talking with a 7-year-old child from SderotFootnote1 who said she was afraid of falling sleep. She told me she already practiced all the breathing techniques she had been taught, as part of growing up in a city that regularly is under missile attack, but to no avail. There was something so endearing about her, and her mother, who was sitting a bit embarrassed beside her. The words burst out of me: have you cried?
She looked surprised. Looked at her mother, who could no longer hold back her own tears. Minutes later, a whole family and a therapist were sitting, crying and looking for words to express the torrent of emotions pouring out of them.
Splitting, Klein believed, has to occur when two contradicting emotions cannot reside in the psyche together without destroying each other and the mind itself. Thus, splitting is the precursor to dissociation. Both these mechanisms are crucial in order to save the mind from what is just too much, from losing itself in face of the unbearable. The equation here is straightforward: if I feel That, I can’t feel anything, anymore.
However, vital as splitting or dissociation are, they are also extremely dangerous. The danger lies at the heart of the mechanism. The paradox is that in order to save myself from the horror flooding me I must sacrifice the three most essential functions of a living human being: creating meaning, feeling pain, and creating psychic movement. These functions (which are at the core of every psychoanalytic theory), are exactly what is destroyed by dissociation. In contrast, they are at the heart of mourning.
Unlike splitting or dissociation, mourning encompasses the mind’s struggle to hold on to the pain that tears our hearts and bodies, to “be there,” to process even the most horrendous feelings. Its’ effort is to create personal meaning, to shape what is happening outside and inside us as our own. Moreover, while dissociation occurs automatically, like a survival reflex, by one mind and only one mind, mourning is a continuous struggle which always requires another person, someone who is willing to meet the dreadful pain of another person with his or her own pain and unspeakable terrors, a kind of “surrendering companion.”Footnote2
Yet, the main difference between splitting-based-mechanisms and mourning-based-mechanisms is, that while the first attempts to hold on to “what is” or restore “what has been,” mourning strives to create radical change within the subject. Recovering from trauma does not mean “coming back to oneself,” as we sometimes wish. The mere idea of “coming back to oneself” suggests bending and distorting time. Taking in the atrocious present, feeling it, metabolizing it, is an act of conceiving ourselves anew in an unfamiliar, rather uncanny fashion. The task of bringing back to life, in the wake of trauma, the capacity to feel, to generate meaning and to initiate psychic movement, is the task of dwelling in a “me-in-the-future” that I could never imagine being.
Will I, will my family, friends, community, country, will we ever be able to endure such a terrifying yet hopeful process, following October 7th?
Notes
1 Sderot is a city near the Gaza border, which on October 7 was attacked by Hamas terrorists.
2 An amalgam of Ghent’s and Grossmark’s dictums.