Digital Melancholy

Abstract

The digital revolution is having a profound impact on our psychic lives, yet it is difficult to find ways to address its impact that do not break down into a polarization of “technology is all good/technology is all bad.” My aim is to break through that dichotomy by using Freud's landmark essay “Mourning and Melancholia” to explore the idea that the increasing digitization of everyday life has the potential to complicate how we mourn the lost object because it is immortalized in virtual space. Because working through loss engages the creative tension between holding on and letting go, I make the claim that virtualization has the tendency to collapse that tension and thereby inhibit the capacity of many of the psychic functions that make it possible to bear the pain and suffering of loss, for example, imagination, symbolization, and grief work.

Keywords:

• Bion
• Freud
• grief work
• Internet
• Lethe
• melancholia
• Mnemosyne
• mourning
• Narcissus
• Ogden
• virtualization

Notes

^1. What I am developing as the Barthesian perspective on loss strongly resonates with what happens if we stay inside the tension between Freud's early and late theory of mourning.