The reassembly of the body from parts: psychoanalytic reflections on death, resurrection, and cannibalism.
Terror of the dismemberment, disintegration, and decay of the body after death has been represented in ritual, myth, legend, art, and religious belief throughout the ages. So too has the wished-for triumph over these inevitable processes. Commonly, bodily experience after death is represented mentally in cannibalistic ideas of eating and being eaten, which are then countered by the wishful undoing of cannibalistic destruction through its reversal: swallowing as regurgitation, dismemberment as rememberment, disintegration as reassembly. Luca Signorelli's fresco The Resurrection of the Flesh is part of his celebrated group of decorations (1499-1504) of the Cappella Nuova in the cathedral at Orvieto. The doctrinal, iconographic, social, and political contexts of this admired and influential work are explored in order to illustrate how and why this painting represents our greatest fears, along with our triumph over them, as well as our most destructive urges and their reparative counterparts. The photographer Sally Mann has explored these same themes. In What Remains (2003), a series of pictures with accompanying text, Mann documents her exhumation and reassembly of the body of her beloved pet greyhound. Two clinical examples illustrate some ways these concerns (cannibalism and reassembly) may make their appearance in psychoanalytic work.
Gottlieb
Richard M
RM
Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute, USA. rmg@alumni.uchicago.edu
D000328:Adult; D001601:Bereavement; D001828:Body Image; D002190:Cannibalism / Q000523:psychology*; D003643:Death; D005239:Fear; D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008512:Medicine in the Arts; D008875:Middle Aged; D010151:Paintings; D010781:Photography; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D012038:Regeneration; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D014167:Transference, Psychology