The return of the erased: memory and forgetfulness in Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004).
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.
Carel
Havi
H
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
D001601:Bereavement; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D009040:Motion Pictures; D009769:Object Attachment; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D012094:Repression, Psychology