Cybermourning: Grief in Flux From Object Loss to Collective Immortality

Abstract

This essay examines features of cyberreality that are reconfiguring loss and mourning. In turn, it queries a transformation in the nature of object loss that is taking place on the Internet. As we move from a reality based on the acceptance of loss and limit to one of infinite access, concrete losses may be less necessary to mourning than forms of access that propel the object's capacity for collective re-use toward immortality. If we focus too intently on loss at the level of the individual and the group, we will surely overlook how cyberspace is transforming loss into a collective event. Clinical examples illustrate how the burden of loss is increasingly mitigated by mourning's sudden twin: cybermourning.

Notes

Stephen Hartman, Ph.D., is co-chair of the faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Dr. Hartman is a co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and an associate editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues.

¹One may read this as an effort to protect psychoanalytic technique. On the other hand, by delimiting the psychoanalytic frame in defiance of a cultural shift in the way meaning happens, the IPA's position serves to protect a hallowed modernist principle, the Unit Self, and to isolate it from postmodern deconstruction.

²My discussion of groups is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the group literature. I am aware that I am working with a very limited selection of the literature to elaborate a comparison between groups and collectives that will help clarify the nature of collective organization online. It would be interesting to explore how the group literature has imagined, what Volkan (2009)called “large-group identity” in this regard, and to factor in the recent literature on collective mourning during truth and reconciliation inquiries in South Africa and elsewhere. Because these efforts to imagine a group are still bound by juridical borders, I am not discussing them in this study of cybercollectives.

³This is the basic principle of parliamentary procedure: to order “deliberative assembly” (Roberts, 1876).

⁴The same collective response occurred in July, 2010, when Prop 8 was overturned.

⁵Please allow me to repeat for clarity's sake that one does not replace the other; for the moment, at least, the two must find a way to exist in tandem.

⁶I have made all possible efforts to update this paper, originally submitted in 2010, to account for rapidly changing world events influenced by the Internet.

⁷See, for example, www.caringbridge.org. On this site, families and loved ones link together during health crises in a manner that sets collective mourning in motion before, during, and after a person's physical decline.