Serial killers, celebs and monarchs have a shared purpose for all of us. They receive on a 24/7 basis all that we desire, long for, aspire too, want, need, hate, cannot bear, loath, wish to deny and want to banish about ourselves. They are the receptacles of all that we consciously and more often unconsciously project. Yes, those we place on our pedestals of adulation or render to the depths of hell are really, as far as our psychological processes are concerned, never anything more than a piss pot.
We are, at this very moment witnessing or joining in with a massive collective projection. The presence of a dead monarch is enabling an equally massive outpouring of what appears to be grief. The streets are lined with tear-stained faces and, just in case no one notices, some are taking to social media describing in detail the crying they have done. All believing it is for the dead queen.
It is a tragedy of the particularly English human condition that as a people the English people are not conditioned to mourn. If they do then it is usually a prescribed version (e.g., an instruction of ten days, up until the funeral, only until return to work / school etc, until Aunt Sally has visited, until the reading of the will etc etc). No, the English version of mourning is not respectful of psychological need. Such need does not get a mention. As with the death of Diana, what we are witnessing now underscores that for the English to grieve it seems they need permission.
Unlike cultures and traditions, the world over the English people do not ‘do death’ or indeed loss of any kind, not consciously at least. The British defining Victorian ‘stiff upper lip’, although thankfully in decline, still has a determining influence passing as it does in the English psyche from generation to generation. For something that is upheld as a personal quality, it comes at an extraordinary high cost.
The denial, minimisation, disowning of grief, the resistance to successfully mourn, is evidenced by the long waiting lists for counselling and psychotherapy. Grief denied, is what informs the thousands of admissions to the countries psychiatric hospitals and prompts the prescribing of millions of doses of anti-depressants year upon year. For as Freud made clear over a century ago, when we don’t mourn, when we don’t allow for grief, we do depression instead.
I’ve lost count of the number of people I assess for clinical intervention who have self-diagnosed depression. I routinely enquire as to what losses have, they experienced over the previous three years. The answer is nearly always ‘none’. If there has been a bereavement it is often mentioned almost as an afterthought. The myriad of other kind of losses those not requiring a body count, do not get a look in. They are of course still a loss and often a profound one; – job, home, pet, status, identity, esteem, confidence, health – life at some point rips all these things away. So not surprising then that further deeper persistent digging by the therapist always, always reveals one or more profound experiences of loss. It’s not antidepressants that are required, its surrender to the process of mourning. No one cannot skirt around grief, it cannot be bypassed or jumped over. Grief must be owned and allowed to happen.
When any individual or culture invests in avoidance of the mourning of individual losses, something must be done with the grief. The most common way of enabling the expression of what is not allowed or banished is to project it. We place what is forbidden onto something or someone else. Then with great relief we ‘piss’ what we do not want onto and into that chosen receptacle. In English culture the death of a monarch or indeed anyone with celebrity status is perfectly placed to fulfil this role. They are a safe bet, remote and distant enough to give the impression that the loss of them is breaking our heart, when all the time they cannot possibly do. We don’t know them. We care only for the loss of what we have made them to be, how we’ve allowed them to sit in our minds, how we need them to be.
On the occasions we are forced to take the delusion of projection back into ourselves we do not respond well. We do not cope well with a ‘saintly’ monarch who treated a dead daughter in law with total contempt or a ‘saintly’ king who has a liking for tampons, or a ‘noble’ prince who has sex with a child and worse still in the thinking of some a ‘noble’ prince who marries someone who is black. The evidence reveals much about the desperate need for a ‘piss pot’ and how people behave when it leaks or indeed when we see our own reflection in its steamy putrid content of revealed reality. We do not like it.
Projected grief does not work, it fails us again and again. Like all defences it takes us eventually back into the very heart of the thing we desperately are seeking to avoid in the first place. In relation to a dead monarch, the projection wears thin in a relatively short space of time. Attempts to maintain it are evidenced in how quickly the focus shifts from the royal corpse to everything else surrounding it; selfies when the coffin passes by, analysis of queuing, near hysteria when another famous ‘piss pot’ joins in, and for some…. opportunities to commit sexual crime and I guess a range of other disturbed behaviours we are yet to hear about.
Failure to grieve about the real losses in our lives and not the losses of our chosen receptacles, leaves us numb. Being numb with grief stops us feeling what we need to feel. When we are stupefied, the consequence is that we tend to act stupidly. Need I say more.
When this current ‘piss pot’ has failed, the invitation remains to take back the projection of our own unique losses. those losses that are real to us because they are intimately closer to home. The losses defined by connection, relationship. The searing losses of attachment that, for a time, we can only bear by projecting out the raw pain of loss.
Projection hinders real grief and distorts the mourning we need to do. Collective projection makes mourning about everyone else and not about its uniqueness to us. When we can bear to welcome it as solely ours, then and only then can we be healed. Mourning is an innate process that enables healing. Mourning calls, us with dignity to be with our losses, to own them, feel them, allow them. It is a lonely process, a process of the soul that only our very own self can do. Far from the madding crowd mourning gives permission for our lives to be rearranged because that is what loss does.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
