“Mourning and Melancholia” Meets The Babadook: Emptiness and its Relation to Absence

Abstract

This paper explores how the film The Babadook illuminates psychoanalytic understandings of melancholia and mourning. The author attempts to unwind the complicated character of melancholia, using Freud as an initial point of orientation, then relying on a few ideas from Klein and later writers. The paper attempts to refine our understanding of the difference between absence and emptiness, especially the difference between being captured in the nothing or deadness of melancholic emptiness, on the one hand, and being alive enough to suffer the absence of a lost object, which bears a potential for mourning, on the other. The possibility of psychic tension between these states is explored. Some implications of the relationship between absence and emptiness for the mourning process are considered. The author uses the film as a resource throughout.

Keywords:

• Melancholia
• mourning
• absence
• emptiness
• defensive omnipotence
• potential presence

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors do not have any relevant financial or non-financial competing interest.

Notes

1 All quotes from the film The Babadook are: Kent, J., Director (2014). The Babadook, produced by K. Ceyton & K. Moliere. Screen Australia, Causeway Films, Smoking Gun Productions.

2 Kernberg (2000) notes the enduring relevance of Freud’s essay, writing, “‘Mourning and Melancholia’ points to the central importance of pathologically intense ambivalence, self-directed aggression, severe pathology of internalized object relations, and a constitutional disposition to the activation of depressive affect. It is remarkable how these basic components of Freud’s contribution continue at the very centre of our contemporary psychoanalytic theory of depressive pathology” (p. 101).

3 The term anti-libidinal is intended to denote the primitive destructiveness that opposes and replaces erotic attachment and investment when the ego is “totally impoverished” (Freud 1917, p. 253) by melancholic regression. The film chronicles Amelia’s descent not just into lovelessness but from object-love into an active, anti-libidinal destruction/negation of objects and otherness.

4 Klein (1975) views mourning as the fundamental integrative process from infancy onward. She writes, “Just as the young child passing through the depressive position is struggling, in his unconscious mind, with the task of establishing and integrating his inner world, so the mourner goes through the pain of re-establishing and reintegrating it” (p. 354).

5 Levy (1984), Yates (2015), and others also argue that emptiness is a defensive accomplishment of the ego rather than simply an ego-deficiency.

6 This touches on the psychotic dimension in cases of severe melancholia. Early in his essay, Freud (1917) comments on our universal resistance to giving up any libidinal position. “This opposition can be so intense,” he writes, “that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a wishful hallucinatory psychosis” (p. 244). This is taken up and refined by Klein (1975), Jacobson (1971), Kernberg (2000), and others who elaborate on conditions of defensive states of psychotic regression. See Kernberg (2000, p. 96-97).

7 Following from Lacan’s observation that the father is absent but always somewhere in mother’s unconscious, Green comments, “But to say that he is absent means that he is neither present nor non-existent but that he has a potential presence” (1993b, p. 50).

8 This fits with Britton’s (2003) idea of destructive as opposed to libidinal narcissism. Also see Shengold (1994) and Wurmser (2003), whose studies explore malignant envy and primal superego destructiveness as totalizing, omnipotent defensive reactions to an imminent sense of self-dissolution in the face of injury or loss.

9 Melancholia should not be associated, for example, with the mindlessness of Eigen’s (1986) psychotically detached patient, Lenny, nor with the cold, conscienceless psychopath idealized in film and fiction. Both live too far from their potential psychic pain to suffer its distant vibration.

10 For discussion of the distinction between symbolism and metaphor and its relationship to mourning, see Clarke (2022).

11 Bolognini (2004) remarks that a receptive, realistic analytic stance depends on the analyst’s ability to mourn in a specific way. He writes, “The analyst needs to have really worked through a deep mourning: mourning for the archaic omnipotent illusion that he can exert so much control over his own affects as to be able to decide what they have to be” (p. 71, original italics).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brett H. Clarke

Brett H. Clarke is an Adult Training & Supervising Analyst at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute (CPI), where he teaches and supervises. He is a former Co-Director at CPI and has for many years co-chaired CPI’s Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy Program. He has a clinical practice in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Cincinnati, Ohio.