Mourning Diaries: a dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature amidst a pandemic

ABSTRACT

Faced with the Brazilian government's negationist attitude which led to the exponential increase of deaths by COVID-19, the work of mourning is approached, in this work, as an element in the context of collective catastrophes that favors a political stance and a subjective elaboration of traumatic situations. We will then underline how mourning appears in literature as a strategy of subjectivation of what has been lost, especially through the writing of diaries. Based on the theoretical elements of Freud on mourning and Ferenczi on the appropriation of the traumatic, three diaries by authors who describe the work of mourning (Rolland Barthes, Boris Fausto and Neal Peart) are analyzed. It can be seen in these texts how mourning promotes a rearrangement of memories, entangling the individual and the collective, the exterior and the interior, calling for testimony. It also favors instinctual and narcissistic stabilization, enabling new approaches and the construction of a future life project. In the end, as a counterpoint to the federal government's disrespect for the grief of those who lost relatives and friends during the pandemic, the duty to recognize grief, to value it and to offer support for its realization is highlighted as a political strategy to promote the mental health. © 2022 Universidade Federal do Parana - Departamento de Psicologia. All rights reserved.