‘The relic and the work of mourning’

Abstract

Following chapter 2 of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Fédida considers the function of the relic - and remnant - in the work of mourning in terms of the psychic mechanism of disavowal (Verleugnung) which underlies the capacity for living a paradoxal state: acceptance of something no longer possible, no longer present, precisely because it is neither possible nor present. Above all, Fédida is concerned with the autonomy of the relic in the psychic life of mourning, the function of which is to prevent the representation of one’s own death to oneself and thereby to permit continuance in time. Underwriting the relic in the work of mourning is the relation knowledge-belief and the meaning of separation, since the freezing of the process of separation can lead to a greater role of unanalyzable, potentially psychotic elements, hence the relic can enter into an economy of the psychoses.