Mourning, Melancholia, and the Replacement Child: On the Memorial Pedagogy of Loss

• In Event: Difficult Childhoods: Adult Memories of Innocence, Displacement, and Loss

Abstract

This paper draws from Sigmund Freud’s (1917) concepts of mourning and melancholia to examine the inter-generational passage of traumatic loss as symbolized in the literary figure of the “replacement child” (Schwab, 2010). Through the replacement figure, I mine an ambiguity in Freud’s discussion that offers a productive way to read mourning and melancholia less as “mutually exclusive ways of seeing” and more as “a productive pair” (Stillwaggon, 2017, p. 34). That is, I trace the ways in which the logic of traumatic history can painfully repeat in the figure of the child, but also, how this same figure may also set into motion creative processes, needed to mourn and so re-signify a relationship to this very inheritance.

I take as my object of analysis Anne-Marie MacDonald’s novel (2014), Adult Onset that features a replacement child struggling to work through a history of familial and cultural loss. In the novel, history melancholically materializes in the child protagonist, Mary Rose, taking shape in a lifetime of debilitating symptoms: depression, bone pain, migraines, unexplained anger, and blank spots in memory. The novel, I suggest, offers a window into childhood as a haunted house symbolizing the abject return of traumatic history otherwise repressed inside dominant narratives of nation and normative growth (Ahmed, 2010).

The implications of my paper reach into two contexts. In the first, I add to growing debates over the status of melancholia in relationship to historical legacies, colonial violence and loss (Britzman, 2017; Taubman, 2017; Stillwaggon, 2017). In this context, a number of scholars have re-read Freud’s melancholia as a generative and potent reminder of lives unjustly eschewed from dominant narratives of national history (Ahmed, 2010; Cvetkovich, 2012; Eng & Kazanjian, 2003; Sarigianides, 2017). My paper considers how the replacement child might soften the binary constructed through this debate, exposing both divergences and convergences across both positions. In the second, I consider how debates over mourning and melancholia affect understandings of childhood and education. Beyond guides, plans, and policies circumscribing work with children, and beyond seemingly universal stages securing what the developing child means, the replacement figure lays bare the inner work of loss, the afterlife of childhood rooted in adult conflict, and the pain of integrating “difficult knowledge” as formative and transformative in the making of a meaningful life (Britzman, 1998, p. 118). My conclusion underscores the pedagogical significance of these psychoanalytic insights for practicing theorists and theorizing practitioners.

Author

• Lisa Farley, York University