Mourning and . . .

I dreamed again last evening (again and still) about death. Over the past month or so I have experienced several dreams in which someone close to me had died. In last night’s dream my friend was going to a hospital where she planned to die by assisted suicide. Exact circumstances of the illness, etc. remained unclear. In the same dream the wife of another friend had recently died, and I asked how he was managing his grief. He said, “As Thoreau and [another author] had said . . .” and I interrupted him and shouted, “Everyone has the right to mourn.” Not certain what I might have meant by that exclamation. But of course, if everyone has the right to mourn, they also have the right to mourn in their own way. And therefore, my response was totally inappropriate and somewhat rude. I don’t know quite what might have provoked my response, but I was adamant in it. Perhaps it was another measure of my developing self. Later in the dream another friend who earlier in another dream had passed out of existence (at least to me) appeared and then disappeared again. As I said above, over the past month I have had several similar dreams and I have lost not a few close friends.
            I have wondered to what these dreams refer. Death has been on my mind because in the news lately several people with whom I matured have died: Ian Tyson, John Prine, Bill Staines, David Crosby, Scott Alarik (for me a more recent relationship). There have4 been others in the recent and less recent past. Who am I fooling? Both Spinoza and Montaigne argue that a free man thinks least of all of death because he is too busy living. Montaigne says that he hopes death finds him planting his cabbages. I am very fond of cabbage. But alas, I am not so free, and I fret constantly about death. Hypochondriacs are never wrong; they are just early.
            I place great interest in dreams. Freud said that they were the route to the unconscious, and Barbara believed that in the dream aspects of myself are distributed amongst all of the characters who occupy my dream. I have learned to trust both Freud and Barbara, and Barbara’s insight suggests to me why in any dream the only voice I hear is my own. Other people’s mouths move but they aways speak in my voice. I am, indeed, everyone in my dream.
            I am thus intrigued by my death dreams and have come to interpret them thus: Each of the friends who in the dream had died I have held as venerated objects. Marvin might call them ideal objects. Each of them represented traits that I wanted for myself. And so, when they die in the dream, I think it has meant that I no longer need them as ideal objects: I have acquired the traits that they represent and now I no longer need to retain their images as part of myself. I am me. Once those traits were external to me and now they have become me.
            But I do not mourn their deaths. Freud suggests that mourning concerns the recognition of the loss of an object. After some time, the energy that was once directed toward that object is now directed toward another object. In melancholia, Freud’s term for depression, there is no new object at which to direct the energy and so the energy that ha been directed toward that object is drawn into the ego. That energy not finding an object to which it might attach then identifies the ego with the abandoned/lost object: the libido sees loss in the ego, sees only shadows of objects, and then the superego criticizes the ego as if it were an object. The ego has become an emptiness and that emptiness is what we even now we have come to know as depression, or in Freud’s terms, as melancholia. So, returning to that first dream above, to mourn in one’s own way is to discover an object on which energy can be directed. And that is certainly an individual affair and none of my business.