Book Festival: Darian Leader goes into mourning

It’s nigh-on impossible to do justice to Darian Leader’s engaging talk on his new topic of psychoanalytic study in a short article such as this, but I’ll attempt to sum it up as best I can.

The respected professor is among the top of his field, and his latest book, The New Black, looks at how humans deal with mourning and loss. His lecture was clear and precise enough for a layman to follow, but displayed a vast amount of research into the topic.

Taking an essay by Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, he makes a distinction between mourning and “being haunted” by losing a loved one. In his opinion, the mourning process does not occur that often, and the concept of being able to immediately put a deep sense of loss behind oneself after a set period of mourning is impossible.

He mentioned some interesting case-studies from patients of his, including a woman who developed an obsession with viewing the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 from every perceivable angle. Strangely, she had no connection whatsoever to anyone who died in the attacks. More inquiry revealed that this affliction was linked to a disturbing childhood memory of her father throwing her mother down the stairs, revealing the concept of “framing” the memories of our loss in an artificial place.

Leader went on to highlight the importance of psychologically “killing the dead” through placing them underground to allow people to cope with their loss, and how someone’s death can cause their loved ones to reassess themselves. Memorably, he described how widows often lose their sense of being a woman after losing their husband.

I’m sure even the most amateur psychology student will be able to pick holes in my interpretation of Leader’s talk, and for the sake of brevity I’ve had to leave huge chunks of it out. However his cool, dispassionate oratory and scholarly mien allowed him to communicate his complex academic discipline well.