Int J Psychoanal 2007;88: 1071-82 FILM ESSAY 10.1516/ijpa.2007.1071 The return of the erased: Memory and forgetfulness in Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004) Director: Michel Gondry Havi Carel, Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, University of the West of England, St Matthias Campus, Oldbury Court Road, Bristol, BS16 2JP, UK — havi.carel@uwe.ac.uk Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is a film about remembering and forgetting loss. This essay reads the film as an examination of mourning and melancholia, which are distinct ways of remembering and forgetting both a love object and its loss. Freud distinguished mourning from its pathological counterpart, melancholia, claiming that there is a normal way to grieve, mourning, and its degeneration into an abnormal pattern, melancholia. The author aims to make two points: firstly, that both processes are characterized by ambivalence and identification and therefore have some commonalities; secondly, that there is a difference between the two processes that is less apparent than the ones discussed by Freud. This is the difference between remembering a good and a bad object. Following Klein the author argues that this is a crucial qualitative difference between mourning and melancholia. She concludes that a central issue in grieving is not forgetting but remembering well. Keywords: Freud, mourning, melancholia, death, ambivalence, identification, Klein, loss —This is it, Joel, it is going to be gone soon. know. —What do we do? —Enjoy it. In Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, the protagonist, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), decides to erase the memory of her lover, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), after a bitter fight. She contacts a company, Lacuna, which provides this service. Her brain is mapped; the memory traces involving Joel are carefully marked. She is instructed to remove all the objects in her house that are linked to him—photos, mementos, clothes—and bring them to the lab. That night, while Clementine is asleep, a technician enters her home, hooks her up to a computer, and erases all her memories of Joel. A few days later, Joel visits the bookshop in which Clementine works. She does not recognize him and is already involved with a new man. In his anger Joel decides to go through the same procedure, but, while hooked up to the computer, fast deleting his memories of Clementine, something within him rebels. He feels that this erasure, although providing redemption from the pain of mourning, is somehow wrong; that his memories of Clementine and his mourning for her should not be erased, despite the pain they afford him. ©2007 Institute of Psychoanalysis1072 Hav Canta. The utopian idea examined—and refuted—in this cinematic thought experiment is that love could be painless. That we should experience love only as long as it is good, only as long as it makes us happy. And when the going gets tough, when love turns into rejection or mourning, we should just walk away, crase the love and forget the loved one and her place in our life. This is, roughly speaking, a cinematic version of the implicit contract underlying certain modern relationships: you only stay as long as it is good. This type of ‘pure relationship’, to use Anthony Giddens’s term, has shifted human relationships from the embeddedness of tradition, family, religion and society to the domain of pure feeling, creating a relationship that is ungrounded and free from these bonds. The pure relationship depends only on how enjoyable it is. When it ceases to be good, there is no reason to stay. This idea ofa pure relationship is mirrored in the idea of a pure break-up, coveted by Clementine and Joel and catered for by Lacuna. This notion of relationship sees it omething that can be entirely extricated from someone’s memory, and therefore something that is external, in principle, to the person. Our attachment to someone seen ag a removable bit of data stored in one’s memory; the relationship is scen as disposable and valucless once it is over. Like so many other things in modern life, we should be able to throw it out once we are done with it. The loss of a loved one can be cancelled, so runs the thought examined in the film, by erasing it. This erasure cancels its presence as a past. A dead relationship is a loss that can be neutralized by turning it into a non-loss, something that never was, Lacuna crascs mourning, itself a process of erasure, a double negation annihilating the attachment altogether. A similar idea, or wish, underlies a certain understanding of mourning as a process that has an end, and that the end means ‘getting over’ the lost person, getting over the loss and ‘moving on’. These expressions contain an apt temporal metaphor: ‘getting over’ is moving from a point of view that sees the person in the present to a vantage point from which she is viewed only by looking back. She has been surpassed, left behind, overtaken, Similarly, ‘moving on’ means moving forward while leaving something behind. The question so present in the film’s close depiction of Joel’s intense psycho- logical su ng why does loss hurt so much? Many scenes in the film follow Joel’s reminiscing, hallucinating, anger, pain, tears and anguish—named by Freud the work of mourning. When describing mourning, Freud says, ‘why this ... should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all casy to explain in terms of economics’ (1917, p. 247). The ‘great expense of time and cathectic energy’ which mourning demands is a riddle to Freud. He seems to almost wish to be able to find a solution that would be as good as Lacuna’s memory erasure. If only we could learn to mourn quickly, painlessly, if we could ‘move on’ within a day rather than a year, mourning would cease to be a riddle, Certain readings of Freud’s notion of mourning see him as advocating a tech- nical, economic approach to mourning that is supposed to lead to this ‘moving on’ solution. On this reading, mourning is healthy, because its ultimate aim is to allow the mourner to return to erotic life and to reinvest in a new object. Melancholia is juxtaposed to mourning as a process that has gone wrong, that has become stuck in repetition. There is no moving on in melancholia, just repetition of gestures andTie Return OF THE ERASED 1073 emotions of grief; an unending retreat from life. In mourning, we undo some aspects of a relationship, in order to redo, to ultimately reinvest in a new love. In melan- cholia, we become perpetual mourners; the melancholic never finishes undoing. The loss for the melancholic is no longer a part of life, something to be overcome, but becomes the meaning of life: life itself is mournful. While mourning is a well- defined time-limited process, melancholia is interminable. But what in fact is the difference between mourning and melancholia? Are they juxtaposed processes, or is melancholia simply an intensified and hence patholo- gized form of mourning? In what follows I make two claims. First, | should like to show that both mourning and melancholia are characterized by ambivalence and identification, and that mourning is not simply an efficient short-cut to a fresh start. Rather, it is a renegotiation of the relationship to the lost person both in relation to new bonds and to a reality lacking the loved one. | suggest an interpretation that emphasizes their proximity and their common features: ambivalence, identification and the centrality of loss. My second aim is to show that there is a difference—albcit not the difference Freud thought central—between the two processes. This is the difference between remembering a good and a bad object. Following Klein, I argue that this is a crucial qualitative difference between mourning and melancholia. And so, | argue that mourning is not a process of forgetting but of remembering well. Let us look more closely at the processes of attachment and detachment described by Freud in Mourning and melancholia (1917). Freud realized that the process of detachment from a lost object is an active process, and not an automatic attenuation of suffering; it is a work of mourning, Trauerarbeit. In order to complete this work, the mourner must retract the emotional investment in the lost object, resulting in retrieval and freeing of her libido, which will eventually be ready for new attach- ment. This process is highly demanding in energetic terms, and is manifested through complete preoccupation with working through memories and emotions attached to the lost object, leading to a withdrawal of interest in the external world (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, pp. 485-6). This process of negating a negation, deleting a lack, is one of overcoming death and loss and eventually leads to a new investment in life and in love. This is the normal process of mourning, where the ultimate loyalty is to life, to Eros and to the renewed investment in a new object. On this understanding of mourning, in the attenuation of the investment, both the positive and the negative emotions attached to the lost object become muffled, weakened and, with time, are transformed into dormant memories, which have lost their force. In melancholia, on the other hand, normal working through of loss is turned into a destructive process of self-deprecation. If mourning is life's victory over death and loss, melancholia is the opposite process: death’s victory over life. In melancholia, the ambivalence of emotions towards the loved one becomes central. The ego of the mourner identifies with the lost person, but in a negative way. The portion of hate contained within the ambivalent attitude to the lost one is internalized and viciously redirected against the ego. A loss of someone becomes a loss of a part of the ego, the part that has become identified with the love object. The loss of an external object is therefore replicated in an internal destructive dynamic: the superego’s vicious attack1074 Havi Caret on the ego mirrors the destructive external event, as the shadow of the object falls upon the ego (1917, p. 249). ‘In this way an object loss was transformed into an ego loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification’ (p. 249). Identification, the process of internalizing an external object or part of object, is an important feature of melancholia. It is the process that enables the superego to turn against the ego (after it has been altered by identification) and hence to inter- nalize the ambivalence originally belonging to the attitude towards the lost person. Identification becomes central in melancholia, and is the reason Melanie Klein and others thought of melancholia as a regressive position, in which object-love reverts to narcissistic identification. Freud, too, saw the crucial link between narcissism and melancholia: ‘melancholia, therefore, borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object choice to narcissism’ (p. 250). According to Freud, the melancholic remains trapped in the undoing of the attachment, which instead of detaching her from the lost object becomes a repetitive process of self-destruction, an undoing of the self. ‘In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego itself” (p. 246). What the mourner undoes in order to redo eventually, the melancholic tries, but fails, to undo. Trapped in repetition she is caught in her failure to undo the relationship to the lost love object. Putting aside the huge costs for the melancholic, her position can be scen as more authentic: she remains faithful to the original love object, to the unique attachment. The mourner, on the other hand, recuperates from the loss and is ready to love anew; but this healthy recovery is what makes her love ephemeral. She undoes her lost love through the work of mourning and then redoes by loving a new object, whereas the melancholic refuses to give up her loyalty. She says: this love is not replaceable, this person is unique. T refuse to replace it; it has no substitute. It is this absolute loyalty anchoring melancholia that makes it so hard to treat, so destructive, but also the source of an important insight: whenever we try to overcome loss, we risk becoming addicted to it, as the melancholic is. The melancholic is unable to transform the old love for the one who is no longer there, to keep the love alive but at the same time recognise the fact that the love object itself is gone. She is incapable of separating the love, which remains alive inside her, from the love object that is no longer there. A prime cinematic example of the failure to realize the loss of the object while retaining the love for it is Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, the protagonist of Psycho, Bates, a faithful son (and serial killer), cannot mourn his mother’s death and instead chooses to preserve her corpse in order to maintain the psychotic delusion that she has not died, has not left him. He is foo faithful to his object and thus has to murder every one of his potential lovers. Because he is unable to acknowledge that his beloved mother is no longer alive, Bates must sacrifice reality and choose, so to speak, psychosis over mourning. TAs James Strachey emphasizes in his Introduction to Mourning and melancholia (1917, p. 243), both narcissism and ego ideal enabled the idea of melancholia to emerge. The critical agency (the superego) has a major role for both melancholia and ego ideal.Tue RETURN OF THE ERASED 1075 In extreme cases, such as Norman Bates’s, the psychotic opposes the demand of reality to withdraw the libido from its attachment to the lost object, in a manner *so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ (1917, p. 245). This refusal to admit what reality tells us is true is also manifest in more common experiences, such as seeing the dead person in the street or dreaming about them. But, whereas the psychotic refuses to acknowledge the loss, the melancholic amplifies the loss. She magnifies her loss so as to encompass the whole of life, turning life into a course of bereavement that extends well beyond any specific loss. She mourns not just the lost object, but also becomes fixated on loss itself, our susceptibility and fragility. For the melancholic, the threat of loss is inherent to any attachment, to any object, and hence she sees life as filled with danger and disappointment. Whatever we love might leave us; whatever we invest in could expire and disappear. Mourning becomes internalized, an integral part of the melancholic position: the melancholic ceases to mourn others and begins to mourn herself, herself as always losing, as always expiring. While the psychotic refuses to acknowledge the loss, the melan- cholic refuses to see anything but loss and the danger and pain it brings with it, so that all positive experiences are marred by this threat. She therefore loses her capacity to enjoy life, secing the threat of demise and loss in all of life’s offerings. But is the melancholic’s position so unreasonable? Is not the ‘normal’ person simply denying a truth that the melancholic, in her grief, has come to see? As Freud astutely comments, the melancholic ‘merely has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic ... we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind’ (p. 246). The truth the melancholic seems to have seized hold of is that loss is a central experience of life and transience is a feature of all our experiences and attachments. This view is discussed in Freud’s short essay ‘On transience’, which describes the impasse between himself and his companions, a young poet and a friend, encountered during a stroll in the Dolomite Mountains (1916, p. 305). The young poet is saddened by the transient nature of all things beautiful, and experiences the worthlessness of ‘all that he would have otherwise loved and admired’ (p. 305), which he now sees as «shor of its worth by the transience which was its doom’ (p. 305). Freud, on the other hand, claims, ‘transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment’ (p. 306). As Phillips remarks, for Freud, ‘it is impermanence that confers value; it is the fact of death, of the prodigal forms of transience, that creates pleasure’ (1999, p. 26). According to Freud, transience ‘gives rise to two different impulses in the mind. The first leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted’ (1916, p. 305). These two attitudes towards transience are inherently linked to the question of mourning, as mourning is a process of coming to terms with loss. For Freud’s companions mourning is unbear- able, for mourning contains the idea that one should surrender beauty and value that are transient, while melancholia believes they could be eternal. ‘The idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease’ (p. 306). For Freud’s companions to mourn is to acknowledge1076 Havi Care the loss and transience of life itself; an unbearable admission. Because they cannot accept transience they cannot mourn, and because they cannot mourn they cannot afford to love, as love is always love for the transient, expiring object. But for others, such as Freud, mourning is a creative force, because for those who overcome the fantasy of permanence, the value of an object is enhanced by its transience, its evanescence only lends it a fresh charm (p. 306). For these people, the possibility of loss creates pleasure, and loving life means loving transience. They can affirm life, beauty and desire because they are transient and temporary, and not in spite of this fact. The position of the poet and his friend, distraught and threatened by transience, is melancholic because they refisse to face transicnce, and choose instead to refrain from love because of the danger of loss that is rooted in that love. Whereas Freud, who understands the necessity of transience, is capable of love, aesthetic enjoyment and attachment. He is capable of attachment because he is capable of mourning. To be able to love requires an ability to lose. To return to Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, Clementine tries to deny loss. Like the poet, she recoils from loss, and so chooses to sever the attachment itself. But, unlike the poet, she chooses the unsentimental crasure of memory, so she can move on. Indeed, as was discussed earlier, the film depicts Joel coming into the shop in which she works, only to find that she has already forgotten him, already invested in a new love object, a new man. The speed of her recovery, enabled by technology, cmphasizes the difference between her and the poet in Freud’s essay. He is melancholic, refusing to attach; she is manic, attaching but denying the cost of attachment. Neither the poet nor Clementine attaches genuinely, because neither is willing to take the risk of loss. As Sartre points out, love without the risk of loss is self-defeating because it denies the freedom of the other to choose to love but also to choose to leave (1956, p. 369). Love is an inherently anxious affair. Let us look at Clementine more closely. She is a manic techno-mourner, exploiting technology to avoid loss. Her manic defences merely mask her melan- cholic position. Her focus on the bad object is so intolerable to her that she turns to the extreme solution offered by Lacuna. Having had her memory of the relationship erased, she is overnight made independent and open to new attachments. Clementine has bought her forgetfulness. But this transaction, exchanging money for the erasure of memory, is depicted in the film as a failed attempt. It is doomed to fail, because, as for the poet in ‘On transience’, the refusal to take the risk of getting hurt is also a refusal of genuine attachment. There are two ways to understand her response. The first is to think that Clementine refuses to attach properly and that her refusal of hurt is part of a more global refusal of genuine attachment. In this case, she did not really attach to Joel, or to any of her lovers, in a genuine way. The second is to think that she is attached, and is therefore susceptible to the pain of losing Joel, but this pain is so intolerable to her that she responds with manic defences, in this case, by erasing Jocl completely from her present life and also from her past. 3} would like to thank Matthew Broome for pointing out this affinity with Sartre.‘The Rerurn OF THE ERASED 1077 There are frequent references to forgetfulness in the film. In one scene, Mary (Kirsten Dunst), the receptionist of Lacuna, attempts to impress her boss, Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), by quoting from Nietzsche’s Beyond good and evil: ‘Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders’. This quote represents, to some extent, the ‘moving on’ solution marketed by Lacuna and embraced by Clementine. But Mary then adds, ‘Nietzsche. Beyond good and evil. Found it in my Bartlett’s’. The quotation itself is presented ironically as taken from Bartlett’ familiar quotations. Nietzsche, or the original, has been forgotten. This is not insignificant. It tells us that the price of forgetting is that of sacrificing the original vital emotion in favour of a second-hand, or inauthentic, attitude to reality; in other words, exchanging Nietzsche for Bartlett. This is, in a nutshell, the film's ultimate criticism of Clementine, as representing the ‘moving on’ solution. In another scene, Mary quotes from Alexander Pope’s poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, a poem about a loved one being remembered. This, too, is ironic, as Mary has had her own memory erased. She was previously in love with her boss, Dr Mierzwiak, and had an affair with him. He then used Lacuna’s technology to conveniently get over the affair by erasing Mary’s memory. Mary continues working for Lacuna, and what we see in the film is her falling in love again with the same man. Forgetfulness is Dr Mierzwiak’s business, but the return of the erased is nonetheless inevitable. When Joel’s memory erasure goes wrong, Dr Mierzwiak is called urgently to his home. He stays out until dawn, and his wife, Hollis, who knew about the affair, confronts him and Mary in the street, thinking the affair was starting again. Hollis says, ‘Don’t be a monster, Howard. Tell the poor girl. You can have him, sweetie. You did’. Mary retums to the Lacuna office, finds her own file and finds out what happened to her in the past. Having realised the ultimate error in Lacuna’s erasure business, she returns files and tapes to all of Lacuna’s clients who had their memory erased. In this gesture she rejects the ‘moving on’ solution, in favour of mature and authentic mourning. This authentic mourning is portrayed in the film by the character of Jocl. He is crushed by mourning, unable to leave his world of memories and toss. Cradled by memories and pain, his claustrophobic world is full of glimpses of Clementine. He fully experiences the loss, retreating to an internal world of reminiscing. Throughout the film, we see glimpses of Joel suffering, crying, reminiscing and disengaged from the present by his complete immersion in the past. Superficially, it may look like Joel is melancholic, while Clementine has successfully embraced the ‘moving on’ solution. But the melancholic in the film is not Joel; it is Clementine. What we observe in these painful scenes is Joel mourning. Life seems to him tasteless and the world a forlorn place. But within this pain there is an important and life-affirming insight. Joel knows that loss is integral to life, and we must learn to love despite the risk of rejection and disappearance. Clementine, on the other hand, is—surprisingly— melancholic. She, like the poet, refuses to accept the loss and pain entailed by any emotional investment ina transient love object. But, while the poet renounces invest- ment, she renounces mourning by applying manic defences. Freud discusses such a reversal of melancholia into mania in the latter part of Mourning and melancholia.1078 Hawt Care, As he says, the contents of mania are no different to those of melancholia (1917, p. 253). In Clementine’s behaviour, we see the same melancholic refusal of loss, but, in her case, the refusal is achieved by manically erasing the loss, with the help of Lacuna, the company offering memory-crasure services. Clementine also makes clear a further point about melancholia: although the melancholic seems unable to forget, in her endless repetition, she is actually unable to remember. She is unable to remember the good parts of the relationship or the lost object and therefore unable to mourn for their loss. The poct and Clementine are saying in different ways that love for a transient object is not worth it. They each represent a melancholic refusal to embrace the risk and ambivalence inherent to love, having had their fingers burned. The poet rejects attachment to anything transient, while Clementine renounces the importance of remembering, the importance of preserving the past, by becoming a Lacuna client. She renounces the memory of the happiness she had with Joel because of the pain of its loss. She cannot preserve the value of the lost object and must destroy the past in order to have a present. But the result of this destruction is far more consequential than she thinks. For Clementine, no present experience of happiness has value any more, because it, too, will become the past and it, too, may become a source of pain and have to be destroyed. She therefore destroys not only her past, but also her present. We can sce this in her careless, spontaneous behaviour and in her many self-deprecating remarks in the film. She does not value the present, she erases. the past and her attempt to live painlessly is judged by the film to be a failure. We therefore see that Clementine’s solution of living the present is incoherent in her own lights. As we can begin to sec, something is lacking in Freud’s account. He focuses on both mourning and melancholia as processes of forgetting, claiming that good mourning is the ability to forget, while the melancholic is unable to forget, to let go. But, as | would like to show now, the melancholic is not simply motivated by fear of being hurt; and the one who understands transience as the condition of value is not exempt from the pain of loss. For both of these positions, the challenge is to Icarn to love despite the threat of transience and to acknowledge the place of loss in life without giving in to melancholia. We are challenged to find a way of acknowl- edging life’s risks without giving in to the paralysing fear of the melancholic or the annihilation of forgetfulness of those who buy into the ‘moving on’ story. This kind of mourning, I will show, has a productive element to it because it does not require forgetting. Rather, it demands of us to remember, and moreover to remember well. I now turn to Melanie KIcin’s account of mourning, which will provide us with the insight necded to respond to this challenge. According to Klein, both mourning and melancholia cause a temporary regression to what she calls the depressive position, which characterizes carly childhood experiences and in particular infancy. Kicin sces Joss as marking carly experiences, which lead to the infantile depres- sive position. These experiences include weaning (loss of the mother’s breast), the Oedipus situation (loss of the mother and the threat of castration) and ambiva- lence towards siblings (fantasies of destroying and thus losing them). The way to overcome the depressive situation is by internalizing the ‘good’ aspects of the lost‘Tne RETURN OF THE ERASED 1079 object, thereby gradually constructing a stable and secure inner realm that is not threatened by external loss (Klein, 1940, p. 136). External loss experienced later in life takes us back to the early depressive position, and is therefore ‘greatly increased by the mourner’s unconscious phantasies of having lost his internal “good” objects’ (p. 135). Thus, according to Klein, mourning involves a sense of persecution, ambivalence and distrust (p. 136). This emphasis on loss replaces the dichotomy that guided the initial reading of Mourning and melancholia because it accentuates the presence of ambivalence and identification (which typify early loss experiences) in both processes. ‘In normal mouming, as well as in abnormal mourning and in manic-depressive states, the infantile depressive position is reactivated’ (p. 153). This is in opposition to Freud who saw a clear difference between the mourner and the melancholic, or depres- sive, as we would call her today. Klein sees both positions as depressive, while Freud stresses that only the melancholic displays the self-deprecation character- izing depression. Although Klein describes significant differences in the ability to move successfully out of the depressive position, the reactivation of early reactions to loss stands at the basis of all loss experiences. What is important to Klein is to recognize the central role of loss and mourning in mental life in general, rather than stressing the difference between normal and abnormal mourning: ‘any pain caused by unhappy experiences, whatever their nature, has something in common with mourning. It reactivates the infantile depressive position, and encountering and overcoming adversity of any kind entails mental work similar to mourning’ (pp. 143-4), In this sense, mourning and melancholia are similar processes, distinguished by the fact that cathe person who fails in the work of mourning ... [has] been unable in early childhood to establish their internal “good” objects and to feel secure in their inner world. ... In normal mourning, however, the early depressive position, which had become revived through the loss of the loved object, becomes modified again, and is overcome by methods similar to those used by the ego in childhood. (p. 153) So the point of mourning for Klein is the opposite of ‘moving on’: the point of mourning is not to forget or overcome the love or the lost person, but to remember them in the right way, to maintain a positive inner object that is an internalized positive part of the lost object. What is required is not simply identification, but identification with the positive aspect of the object. Such identification allows intro- jection, a way of preserving the object while acknowledging the loss. As Lipton writes: ‘introjection is an attempt to preserve the object, but it is also a step toward giving it up. In fact, it does not take place until the loss is acknowledged’ (1973, p- 274). Identification is active in both mourning and melancholia; the difference lies in the fact that, in mourning, the positive aspects of the object are internalized, whereas, in melancholia, it is the negative aspects. What the melancholic lacks is the capacity to reinstate the good internal object. Returning to Norman Bates, the role of ambivalence in his incapacity to mourn for his mother is now much clearer. At the end of the film, we learn that Norman1080 Havi Careu actually murdered his mother and her lover in a bout of oedipal jealousy. This rapid change of love into hate expresses the ambivalent nature of attachment: to love means also, potentially, to hate, to be vulnerable to the loved person’s slights and rejection and to lash out with hatred as powerful as the tremendous love. Norman’s ambivalence allowed his hatred towards his mother to erupt but later made him regret his actions and try to reverse the situation by keeping his mother alive. This is an extreme example of the power of ambivalence, but, if we turn to the world of the child, murderous impulses are not yet mediated and repressed with the same efficacy as an adult. Norman’s additional incapacity to keep his. mother as a good internal object through the process of introjection made the denial of her death the only coping strategy left to him. Norman Bates is a truly tragic example of the incapacity to mourn. A final step, linking ambivalence and identification is needed to complete this consolatory reading of Mourning and melancholia. In Group psychology and the analysis of the ego, Freud says, ‘{i]dentification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal’ (1921, p. 89). The example used by Freud is that of eating. In cating (and in the oral-cannibalistic phase in general) the object of desire becomes assimilated, literally, into the body of the desirer. This assimilation is also annihila- tion, a destruction of the object that has been assimilated but has now disappeared. This is the point where the distinction between wanting to have something and wanting to be something, becomes blurred and where the dialectical link between love and aggression becomes apparent.’ If identification is always ambivalent and both are present in mourning avd in melancholia, the emphasis on the distinction between the two should be replaced with a broader understanding of the complex demand—present in both processes—to retain the Jove for the lost object, while acknowledging its irretricvable loss. To conclude, we should reject the seductive but erroneous view of mourning given by Lacuna, the memory-crasing services. We do not need a quick way of forgetting. Rather, we need a better way of remembering. We need to retain our identification with the good object in order to be able to mourn. At the end of the film, Jocl and Clementine meet again. Innocent of ever having known each other, they begin a relationship. But after their first night together they are sent information about their crasure from Mary, the receptionist who left Lacuna after finding out she, too, had her memory erased. They listen to the tapes, in which their voices explain why they want the other erased from their memory. ‘And the whole thing with the hair—it’s all bullshit’, says Joel in the tape, referring to Clementine’s frequent change of hair colour. The real Joel contradicts the bitter voice on the tape: ‘1 really like your hair’, he says to Clementine. The taped accusations roll on, more bitter allegations and petty charges—the bad object. But Joc! and Clementine override these with their positive present voices, They learned that remembering only the bad object is a failure to mourn. The post- Lacuna Joc! and Clementine are now capable of holding on to the good object. The ‘For more on this issue, sce Carel, 2006,‘Tue RETURN OF THE ERASED 1081 film does not end with a continued relationship, but with the promise of a good remembering, and, as odd as this may sound, of a good mourning. Acknowledgements. The author would like to thank Matthew Broome, Jordan Carel, Eran Dorfman, lain Grant, Michael Lewis and David Wall for their detailed comments on drafts of this essay. Translations of summary Endliche und unendliche Trauer: Ambivalenz und Erinnerung in Vergiss mein nicht! (2004). Regie: Michel Gondry. Vergiss mein nicht! ist ein Film ilber das Erinnern und Vergessen eines Verlustes. In diesem Beitrag wird der Film als Untersuchung der Trauer und Melancholie interpretiert, zwei unterschiedlichen MBglichkeiten, ein Liebesobjekt und seinen Verlust zu erinnem und zu vergessen. Freud unterschied zwischen der Trauer und ihrem pathologischen Gegenstiick, der Melancholie, und behauptete, dass es eine normale Form des Grams ier einen erlittenen Verlust gebe ~ die Trauer — und eine anomale Form, die Melancholie. Die Autorin formuliert zwei Thesen: erstens, dass beide Prozesse durch Ambivalenz und Identifizierung gekennzeichnet sind und infotgedessen Gemeinsamkeiten haben; zweitens, dass zwischen den beiden Prozessen ein Unterschied besteht, der aber weniger offensichtlich ist als die von Freud beschriebenen Unterschiede, Dieser Unterschied betrifft das Erinnem eines guten baw. eines bdsen Objekts. In Anlehnung an Klein wird dies als ausschlaggebender qualitativer Unterschied zwischen Trauer und Melancholie postuliert. Die Autorin zieht den Schluss, dass ein zentraler Aspekt der Trauer nicht das Vergessen sei; vielmehr gehe es darum, das verlorene Objekt in guter Erinnerung zu behalten. El retorno de algo borrado: Recuerdo y olvido en el filme Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004) [(en castellano) Olvidate de mi!|. Director: Michel Gondry. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind es una pelicula sobre el recuerdo y el olvido de una pérdida. Este articulo plantea una lectura de esta pelicula como una reflexién sobre el duelo y la melancolia que son modalidades diferentes de recordar y de olvidar tanto el objeto de amor como su pérdida, Freud distinguié el duelo de su contrapartida patolégica, la melancolia subrayando que hay una manera normal de entristecerse, el duelo y su degeneracién en una modalidad anormal que seria justamente a melancolia. La autora pone en discusién dos cuestiones: en primer lugar, que ambos procesos estin caracterizados por la ambivalencia y la identificacién y en consecuencia tienen algunos aspectos comunes; en segundo lugar, que hay una diferencia entre los dos procesos que queda menos patente en el planteamiento de Freud. Se trata de la diferencia entre recordar un buen objeto o recordar uno malo. Siguiendo a Klein la autora sostiene que esta es la diferencia cualitativa esencial entre el duelo y la melancolia. Concluye planteando que un aspecto esencial de la tristeza no es tanto olvidar sino recordar bien. Deuil terminé et interminable : ambivalence et mémoire dans le Eternal sunshine de Michel Gondry. Faire le deuil d'une personne aimée est vivre le maximum de l"expérience de la perte. En tant que tel, il s’agit d'un intense vécu d’anxiété et de chagrin, mais aussi d’ambivalence et de renégociation. Freud a classiquement distingué le deuil de sa contrepartie pathologique, la mélancolie, en soulignant qu'il existe une fagon normale d°étre triste, qu'il appelle deuil, et sa dénégation dans une configuration pathologique, qui est la mélancolie. Je voudrais interroger cette compréhension en montrant que, aussi bien le deuil que 1a mélancolie, sont caractérisés par l'ambivalence et I’identification, et que le deuil n’est pas simplement un raccourci efficace pour un nouveau départ. Mon second objectif est de montrer qu’il y a une différence — bien que pas celle que Freud a considérée comme centrale ~ entre les deux processus. Cette différence se situe entre la remémoration d'un bon et celle d'un mauvais objet. En suivant Klein, je soutiens qu'il s'agit 1a de la difference qualitative cruciale entre deuil et mélancolie. Ainsi, a l'opposé de Freud, je soutiens que {fe deuil n'est pas un processus pour oublier mais pour se souvenir de fagon correcte I1 ritorno di quanto cancellato: memoria e dimenticanza in Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004). Regia di Michel Gondry. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind & un film sul ricordare e sulla perdita Jegata al dimenticare. Questo articolo legge il film come una esplorazione del lutto e della melancolia in quanto vie distinte per ricordare e dimenticare sia un oggetto d’amore che la sua perdita. E' noto che Freud ‘operd una distinzione fra lutto normale e melancolia - la sua controparte patologica. Sosteneva che esiste un modo normale di elaborare il lutto, che in alcuni casi prende un corso anormale e degenera in melancolia. L’autrice vuole mettere in luce due obiettivi: il primo ¢ come entrambi i processi siano caratterizzati da1082 Havi Caren ambivalenza e identificazione ¢ percié condividono un clemento comune. Il secondo obiettivo ¢ quello di dimostrare che trai due processi csiste una differenza ~ che ¢ meno apparente di quelle discusse da Freud. Si tratta della differenza fra il ricordare un oggetto buono ¢ il ricordame uno cattivo. Muovendo da Klein, Pautrice avanza l"ipotesi che questa sia una eruciale differenza qualitativa fra lutto ¢ melancolia. Pertanto Mautrice propone che un elemento centrale del lutto non consista nel processo di dimenticanza, ma piuttosto in quello di una buona capacith di rimembrare. References Carel H (2006). Life and death in Freud and Heidegger. New York, NY: Rodopi. 217 p. Freud S (1916). On transience, SE 14, p. 305-8. Freud S (1917). Mourning and melancholia. SE 14, p. 237-58. Freud S (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE 18, p. 69-143. Klein M (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. Int J Psychoanal 21: 125-53. Laplanche J, Pontalis JB (1973). The language of psycho-analysis, Nicholson-Smith D, translator. New York, NY: Norton. 510 p. Lipton C (1973). Denial and mourning. In: Ruitenbeek H, editor. Interpretation of death, p. 268-80. New York, NY: Jason Aronson. 320 p. Phillips A (1999). Darwin's worms. London: Faber and Faber. 160 p. Sartre JP (1956). Being and nothingness. New York, NY: Philosophical Library. 659 p.