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.
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
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D001601:Bereavement; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D009040:Motion Pictures; D009769:Object Attachment; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D012094:Repression, Psychology