Abstract
The loss of religion is not one thing to all people, nor even one thing to one person. This article asks the question, “when we are talking about the loss of religion, who is mourning what?” The author considers what the loss of religion looks like if we view the self as abiding in both multiplicity and melancholia, and claims that the loss of religion requires a reconfiguration of the inner landscape of centrality and marginality. A clinical example illustrates how one patient’s “loss of faith” calls her to a complex mourning process that includes confronting many personal losses and their relation to her transgendered self.
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Notes
The reader will note that throughout this reflection, I use the term “we,” the collective personal pronoun rather than utilizing the more traditional impersonal voice of scholarly writing. Although I often tend to do this as a matter of style, preferring what I consider a more inclusive personal voice, in this essay the use is particularly deliberate. It refers to the header quote by Judith Butler (2004)—that on many levels at once, loss makes a “we,” if a tenuous one, of us all.
It is important to acknowledge that the analyst is included in this negotiation of loss—the analyst, too, is losing some part of herself as the patient leaves, and the analyst, too, is irrevocably changed by the intimate encounter with the patient. In clinical work, we are constantly confronted with the melancholic structure of our own subjectivity, as our patients inevitably leave us and we deal with the “interminability” of analysis from the other side. The interminability of analysis is an ongoing lesson in melancholy.
Some readers might wonder why, if Bobbie feels herself to be internally male, I refer to her with feminine pronouns. In her sense of being “neither this nor that,” Bobbie has chosen this way to refer to herself most of the time, and so I honor her preference here.
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Cataldo, L.M. Mourning the Religious Self: An Experience of Multiplicity, Loss, and Religious Melancholia. Pastoral Psychol 59, 355–364 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0222-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0222-x