Confessions of a Heretic by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton [Roger Scruton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781910749364
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

8

– Mourning Our losses –

REFLECTIONS ON STRAUSS’S METAMORPHOSEN

In a significant essay entitled ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud writes of ‘the work of mourning’, meaning the psychic process whereby a cherished object is finally laid to rest, as it were buried in the unconscious, and the ego liberated from its grip. Until the work of mourning has been accomplished, Freud argues, new life, new loves, new engagement with the world are all difficult if not impossible. This is the explanation, as he sees it, of the state that used to be known as melancholia – a kind of willed helplessness in which the world is seen as alien and unmanageable.

I am not, in general, persuaded by Freudian psychology. But in this matter, it seems to me, Freud was on the right lines. We lose many things in our lives. But some losses are existential losses. They take away some part of what we are. After such a loss we are in a new and unfamiliar world, in which the support on which we had – perhaps unknowingly – depended is no longer available. The loss of a parent, especially during one’s early years, is a world-changing experience, and orphans are marked for life by this. The loss of a spouse can be equally traumatic, as is the loss of children, who take with them into the void all the most tender feelings of their parents. Such losses leave us helpless, and even if we find a way of healing the wounds that they make, the scars will remain.

Religions, laws and customs all provide for the ritual mourning of beloved people. But there are no clear precedents for the work of mourning, when what is mourned is a nation, a civilisation or a place. And if it is true that Strauss was mourning, in Metamorphosen, the Germany that he had known, and which had been destroyed by the Second World War, then there is an added problem that he must certainly have encountered, which is the great difficulty we all have, in mourning what we condemn. The work of mourning, as Freud conceived it, is a work of redemption, in which the lost figure is blessed in the memory of the one he leaves behind. All funeral rites, and all elegies for the dead are designed to highlight the virtues and to minimise the vices of the departed person. Mourning is a process of reconciliation, a work of forgiveness, in which the dead person is retrospectively granted the right to die. But what if the departed person cannot be forgiven? What if his vices are an immovable obstacle to all attempts to accept him? Then mourning becomes impossible.

Germans after the war felt this about their country. The Germany that we know from art, music and literature – the Germany of the Gothic cathedrals and the gingerbread cities, of Dürer and Grünewald, of Luther’s Bible, of Goethe, Schiller, Kant and Hegel, the Germany of the romantic poets and of the greatest continuous musical tradition that the world will ever know – that Germany had been poisoned in people’s thoughts by Hitler.

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