When a 19-ton truck drove onto the Promenade des Anglais in Nice at 10.35 pm on 14 July 2016, it caused mass deaths. Along the truck's route, which was just under 2 km, 86 victims died, many children (20% under 15 years old), and entire families were decimated. In June 2019, almost three years later, the father of a deceased child ‘died of grief’, and was declared the 87th ‘direct victim’ of this attack (Le Figaro, 2019). This event still marks the city of Nice, its inhabitants and its urban planning, every day.

It is from this observation that the Idex research programme #14July2016 aimed to address, in a multidisciplinary way, the links between space, trauma, and mourning in the context of the attack on the Promenade des Anglais. It aimed to identify the ways in which traumatic grief modifies spaces and conversely how spatial modifications can constitute markers or resources for the work of mourning. The multidisciplinary research team (9 researchers, 6 disciplines, 3 laboratories in Nice) made it possible to work on different types of spaces affected by the attack: urban, digital, scriptural, or artistic. The team collected data in the form of various publications (newspapers, written testimonies, books), but also from interviews with users of the Promenade, people who work there (e.g. road workers, café employees), municipality staff (municipal police officers, Director of Transformation Works, or the Municipal Archives), and finally interviews and meetings with people bereaved as a result of the attack. Since 2018 we have also walked along the Promenade every year around 14 July, surveying all the deposited spontaneous memorials. A previous publication presented the first results from a multidisciplinary perspectiveFootnote 1 (Emsellem et al., 2021). Building on this work, this chapter will explore how traumatic mourning in its unconscious part uses and modifies the urban space. The reference to psychoanalysis and structuralism distinguishes this research from other works on memorial topography (Antichan et al., 2017).

When the chaos of the attack differentiates everything (urban space, bodies, and words), what forms of differentiation appear, and how do they arise? In the aftermath of the attack, we have been able to identify multiple forms of spatial modifications and differentiations, whether they are the result of political decisions (urban and security reorganisations) or individual ones (spontaneous monuments). As we will show using several examples, these modifications confront the bereaved with two types of loss: a traumatic loss (the absolute void left by the other in their brutal death) and a symboligenic loss (which contributes to the reconstruction of urban symbolic differentiations). This chapter proposes a theoretical articulation of these two types of loss thanks to the psychoanalytical concept of mourning, which also makes it possible to identify movements of resistance to this doubling of loss. Finally, I will conclude with the hypothesis that the Freudian concept of construction would make it possible to envisage a theoretical alternative to resilience thinking.

Un-Undifferentiated and Undifferentiating Mass Death

To the horror of a multiple death, the attack added the further horror of a death that was not only undifferentiated but also undifferentiating, in the sense that the individualised bodies were touched, torn apart, and sometimes mixed together. The dehumanisation of mass death has been joined by the dehumanisation of dismembered, indistinguishable bodies (Vimal, 2019: 41). To put it in terms of the three categories used by Jacques Lacan (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real),Footnote 2 the symbolic dimension—understood in its structuralist meaning as the articulation of oppositional distinctions—was transitorily annihilated, taking with it all possibility of mobilisation and imaginary recognition, in an experience that some specialists call sideration or shell shock. From a psychoanalytical point of view, this traumatic sideration can be defined as a confrontation with the Real.

The symbolic capacity to produce differentiation has thus been affected at multiple levels. Here are 4 of them:

  1. 1.

    loss of language capacity in the traumatic shell shock;

  2. 2.

    transient loss of social links of urbanity in the flight movements of the crowd;

  3. 3.

    loss of bodily differentiation allowing the victims to be identified;

  4. 4.

    as for space, it is an absolute disfigurement. One of the first aiders to arrive on the scene said: ‘The Prom doesn’t look like anything we know anymore. Nothing you can imagine. It is the apocalypse’ (Magro, 2017: 73).Footnote 3

However, for each of these losses of differentiation, we have observed the appearance, more or less rapidly, of new signifiers, new formations of differentiation. Where chaos has reigned (Real), erasing distinctions, the human symbolic capacity—individual or collective—responds, by producing or inventing signifiers in order to recover these capacities of articulation (Symbolic), and to allow the return of forms with stabilised and recognisable contours that allow social life (Imaginary). If we take up the four levels mentioned above, what are these forms of response?

  1. 1.

    At the language level, it is the difficult work of speaking, which accepts to come up against this enigma: how to continue to speak in the face of the unspeakable?

  2. 2.

    At the social level, not only were there more or less spontaneous forms of organisation that had to be set up in the emergency, but also the rapid and disconcerting resumption of some of the activities typical of the Promenade des Anglais (jogging, sunbathing, swimming).

  3. 3.

    At the level of the bodies, of the remains, it is the counting, which takes on all its importance here—the counting as a response to the dismemberment, as a restarting of the accounting of the one by one, a restarting of the nominative and symbolic functions (articles in the newspapers about each victim, etc.)

  4. 4.

    What about space? What spatial differentiations have emerged and, above all, how do they arise? It is striking that many of the spatial responses to loss, which aimed to inscribe new differentiations, also involved other forms of loss. It is this process, at the heart of the links between space, mourning and signifier, that will be discussed.

Reappearance of Spatial Differentiation, Not Without New Losses

Even before the attack, embellishment work was already planned, but a week later the mayor placed an order to integrate a ‘security and sanctuary’ infrastructure. The political choice was to prevent a similar scenario to the one already experienced: the device should block a 19-ton truck. Thus, as of February 2017, the scene of mourning gave way to a construction site. The 2 km of road travelled by the truck became impassable and was populated by construction crews and machinery. The traces of the attack were to be erased, the fear eliminated, the death contained as quickly as possible (no public consultation was carried out). For the decision-makers, the Promenade had to remain ‘the same’ (interview of Head of Works, 2019). The security system had to be ‘invisible so as not to oppress’ (Head of Works, 2019). A system of cables and retractable anti-intrusion pillars, and the installation of palm trees separating the soft traffic from the car lane and underlining the curve of the Baie des Anges were chosen. The colour white was adopted for this new street furniture in order to ‘make it transparent’ (Head of Works, 2019), in harmony with the blue of the sea. The pavement has been completely redone. The same waterproof asphalt, chosen for its comfort and fineness, now covers the entire length of the beautiful avenue. Traffic lanes have been marked out: white borders, black asphalt for cyclists and red for pedestrians. When questioned, the head of works was pleased to see the Promenade smooth and unified along its entire length, whereas before the attack it was—according to him—irregular and made up of different sections: a ‘stained patchwork’ (Head of works, 2019). We can see how the urban transformation is achieved by articulating new spatial signifiers (corridors, barriers, studs, types of pavement, colours, etc.) with a desire for smoothness and imaginary unification (the Promenade, one and the same).

In an interview with a father who had lost his daughter, he told us of his confusion about not being able to find the place where his daughter had been hit by the truck after a few weeks. ‘It’s subtle because it’s almost like before, but you can’t find the places anymore. Everything has been covered up, buried. I feel it's like buried Roman ruins, another civilisation that has gone over it at breakneck speed. It doesn’t exist anymore’. Thus, as this bereaved father expresses it, this urban transformation was the occasion of a new loss. Beyond the traumatic loss, there are other forms of loss that have occurred as a result of the work itself, of the urban response, i.e. the reconstruction of an urban discourse.

It is in this situation that, alongside this profound transformation of the Promenade, a smoothing out of security, spontaneous memorials have appeared. These are testimonies left first by the crowd, and then in the longer term, by relatives or people who felt concerned. These are discreet, often ephemeral practices that are inserted into the folds and interstices of the new urban order. Deposits of objects, flowers, messages, ephemeral traces of ritual and temporary recollection. These memorials thus form new appearances that punctuate and differentiate the Promenade in its space by inscribing marks upon it, but also give it a rhythm in its temporality, in a rhythm of appearances and disappearances, due to their transitory and provisional character. If certain marks are meant to be more permanent (glued or cemented cobblestones on the ground, or plates glued to a bench), they only further emphasise their transient nature: they will inevitably be peeled off, erased, leaving a residue of glue or cement on the asphalt that will itself disappear… In other words, these marks demonstrate a lack, and will themselves become missing, promised to disappear. These new losses are found at the articulation of the singular and the collective. For example, the bereaved father mentioned above, whom we met in January and February 2020, told us that a Christmas tree was put up on the Promenade every year in honour of his daughter, where relatives could leave small notes. When we asked him how the tree was removed afterwards, he suddenly realised that, while in previous years he had called on the services of the town hall for this purpose, this year he had completely forgotten to take care of it! Beyond the tree that disappears, it is also the very idea of the tree that is forgotten and repressed.

Moreover, our anthropologist colleague Pr. Agnès Jeanjean conducted interviews with staff of the public works department (cleaning, gardening), and all of them, in relation to these various tokens left on the Promenade, say that they ‘don’t touch them’. There is a sacred dimension (in the etymological sense of sacer, of the separate) that emerges in these objects or creations, a sacredness that is not necessarily religious but that gives form to absence, mourning, and that also creates absence, holes in the profane space of the Promenade. From a clinical point of view, this doubling of loss is eminently individual, but individual does not mean private. Spontaneous memorials are situated precisely at the articulation of the individual and the collective. They address the social. In so doing, they participate in the effectuation of this doubling of loss at the collective level. The question is how?

Doubling the Loss in Space

One of the key points in these observations is that following the spatial chaos (‘the Promenade is no longer recognisable, it resembles nothing known’), the appearance of these new forms of spatial differentiation contains in itself an act of erasure or loss. There is thus a doubling of loss in the process of reconstruction. Why speak of doubling? On the one hand, there is a traumatic, frightening loss, the absolute void left by the other in his or her brutal death; on the other hand, there is a loss that would be linked to the very fact of reconstruction, we could speak here of a symboligenic loss, a loss that participates in the reconstruction of symbolic differentiations. In other words, the reconstruction of differentiations is not a simple positive fact (e.g. where there is nothing, there is now something). No: in order for there to be something from now on, the nothing must also be renewed, the nothing must be refabricated, hence loss: loss participates in the fabrication of the something. How can we understand this question from the spatial and psychic point of view?

Michel de Certeau, in his approach to spaces and the urban matter already considered that any positive spatial fact was based on a loss. His approach was based on the persistence of a certain negativity at work in the very act of inhabiting. Structuring negativity: as a subtraction from the positive order of functionalist, urban texts and procedures, a subtraction that would be at the very centre of the symbolic system of discursive and linguistic networks that govern and organise spaces. He called the effectuation of this negativity ‘practice’. To characterise what the practices of space do to the built order, Certeau uses the metaphor of the sieve: ‘The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order’ (2011: 107). To practise a space is therefore to dig holes in an order that has already been spatially planned by urban planners, architects, politicians… If we follow de Certeau’s thinking, to practise a space is to subvert meaning, to dig or recreate, to create or recreate a bit of ab-sense, to use Lacan’s term (2001: 452).

Ab-sense is an invention to indicate a hole in the language, an impossibility of saying death (and the sexual relationship). Ab-sense can thus be defined as ‘the impossibility of determining an ultimate sense; this is seen as an effect of subject structure, subordinated to the intrinsic limitations of the symbolic order’ (Koren, 1993: 143). In other words, as far as a patient can follow the meanderings of his or her associations, as far as the analyst can push an interpretation or a construction (cf. below), the discourse inevitably encounters a stumbling block where meaning vanishes, a point where there are no more words, no more signifiers to say… the thing, the Real. In a way that is both close to and different from Wittgenstein, it is a question of identifying ‘a lack of meaning, which is not nonsense, but an absence in meaning’Footnote 4 (Rigal-Granel, 2013: 117). Michel de Certeau’s hypothesis thus consisted in understanding practices as the creation of places of ab-sense in the urban text.

In ‘Empire of Signs’, Roland Barthes writes something very similar about Tokyo, and the Residence of the Invisible Emperor, which makes it its ‘precious paradox’: the city ‘does have a centre, but this centre is empty […] to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing the traffic to make a perpetual detour’ (Barthes, 1982: 30). We find here again this idea of a lack which participates in the establishment of space, but I insist on the word detour which means the action of diverting from the usual path. What is done on the scale of a city like Tokyo can be seen on the scale of the Promenade’s practices: when we come across a spontaneous memorial on the Promenade, we can only go around it, it makes us branch off from our path as walkers, it digs holes of loss in the asphalt of the Promenade. In the same way, the road workers who say that they ‘don’t touch’ the objects, flowers and messages left on the Promenade, make them into something sacred that breaks the order of the public surface. The urban space is therefore a practised place and these practices dig into it, constructing it, producing it against a background of absence and loss.

Doubling of Loss in Mourning

This double loss (traumatic loss/symboligenic loss) also evokes the psychic process at work in mourning. Jean Allouch, in his essential book Erotics of Mourning in the Time of Dry Death, written following the death of his own daughter, writes this: ‘mourning is not only losing someone, it is losing someone by losing a piece of oneself’Footnote 5 (Allouch, 2011: 349). How can we understand the part of ourselves that we lose when we lose a loved one? To answer this question, we must first define what a loved one is (or someone we will feel concerned for).

According to Freud (1923) the relationship to the object of love (a loved one) is psychically conditioned by libidinal investment: in other words, my body cannot ensure its satisfaction on its own (this would then be auto-eroticism) and it thus seeks in the objects of love that which can ensure a certain satisfaction. Lacan (1977) argues that, if I hold the other as an object of love, it is because I suppose that it contains something that my body lacks, another object, which Lacan names with an enigmatic letter ‘object a’: the missing object that causes desire. This ‘object a’ is already lost by the subject, which is why it is the source of his desire. This ‘object a’ is not only already lost to the subject (which is why it is the source of his desire), but also unnameable (it is out of language, out of symbolism, unlike the object of love which is nameable). The ‘object a’ is thus fundamentally missing and unspeakable: the subject’s desire is marked by absence and ab-sense. But mourning complicates this first approach by showing that this lack must be understood in a relationship of reciprocity.

Indeed, what Freud called ‘mourning work’ is a partially conscious and largely unconscious process. In Psychology, mourning is widely regarded as a conscious and controllable process. However, in psychoanalysis, this term designates the unconscious process of which the subject undergoes the effects without being able to control them. This mourning work is triggered when ‘reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object’ (Freud, 1917: 244). Disinvesting the object allows the libido to be brought back to the ego in order to be able to desire another object, called a substitute.Footnote 6 This requires time and psychic energy because the task must be accomplished in detail, in the first instance with an over-investment in the lost object: ‘Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it’ (Freud, 1917: 245). In a way, biological death is followed by a second act of death, actively and in detail perpetrated on each of the memories and hopes that bound the departed. The images proliferate before being abandoned. However, for Freud, this second death may be accompanied by some possible compensation: the abandonment of the object investment may be resolved through a strengthening of identifications with that object.

But for Lacan, there is a problem in speaking, as Freud did, of an identification with the lost love object at the end of the work of mourning, because beyond the love object, there is also the ‘object a’. Let’s start again. I have lost an object of love, that is, already the image of the beloved, invested with my libido—an image that Lacan notes i(a). But what I have lost that is precious in this other, which I suppose is hidden under his or her image, I do not know it, and yet this is what I must produce in order to separate myself from it. This time it is not only the object that the other was for me, but above all the object of desire that I was for the other, that in which ‘I was his or her lack’ (Lacan, 2016: 166).Footnote 7 This is why lack must be understood in a relationship of reciprocity. ‘I was his or her lack’ means that I was his/her object of desire. The paradox, in relation to common sense, is therefore that it is not only a question of knowing what the other was as an object for me, but what I was as an object for him or her, which implies the question, necessarily enigmatic, of his desire. Enumerating my memories of him or her one by one thus serves to constitute, through the reliving of all these detailed links to the image of the disappeared, the object of desire that I was for them. The work of mourning consists in identifying this object, ‘object a’, in order to be able to separate from it later.

Thus, in mourning, the loss of the object of love is doubled by a renewal of the loss of the object a. The human experience of mourning points to this doubling of the loss that each person experiences in their erogenous body. This is why psychoanalysis is attentive to what the bereaved person loses again of him or herself in the mourning process. I quote again Jean Allouch: ‘it is only by being itself lost, graciously sacrificed, that this piece of self satisfies its function of making possible the loss of this someone who has been lost […] Thus, it ceases to possibly appear, like a ghost or a hallucination’Footnote 8 (Allouch, 2011: 351). So there is a part of me that I lose with the loss of the other, and this second, renewed loss has a symbolic effect, it allows me to separate myself from the dead. We know that the rituals of mourning aim first of all to give a place to the dead, a burial that separates them from the living. In the same way, for the bereaved, the question is to find a place for their desire, the empty place of a lack, when the lost being has come to represent and therefore to block this lack for a time.

This approach also allows us to understand the collective dimension of mourning triggered by terrorist attacks. If we feel concerned by the deaths of people we did not know, if we leave an object as a token, if we participate in marches or public ceremonies, it is because these acts concern and mobilise our being as an object of desire. I participate in these events to remain alive as an object of desire, to be able to continue to say, ‘where terrorism seeks to reduce me to a dead object, I am still someone’s lack’. In a way, this is how we could conceive of the terrorist act from a psychoanalytical point of view: as that which denies the human being his fundamental and constitutiveFootnote 9 status of being an object of desire, of being someone’s lack.

All mourning thus confronts the irreducibility of the occasional loss but also the irreducibility of a more fundamental lack. It is precisely these two levels that form the basis of this doubling of loss. In our observations, it seems that this redoubling of the loss is found both at the level of the construction of space and at the level of mourning, like an underlying link that would articulate the two.

Mourning and Space

This is an idea that we can also find in Freud’s text Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1909). Freud refers to the monuments in London (the column at Charing Cross, or the one called The Monument), both of which were built to remember tragic events (the death of a queen, a great fire). But, Freud tells us, the function of these monuments must give way to the imperatives and pleasures of the present: which means that we end up mourning the monument itself! Here, the monument disappears as such. We can therefore understand the potential fate of the monument, which would become a political fetish precisely because it cannot erase itself, because it cannot recognise this ab-sense of which it could be the holder-place, preferring instead to oppose it (see our two examples below). One wonders if all thought of space is not thought of mourning, or if all production of space is not in itself mourning.

This is in line with the thesis of Mumford Lewis in his great book The City in History: ‘Mid the uneasy wanderings of palaeolithic man, the dead were the first to have a permanent dwelling […] the city of the dead antedates the city of the living’.Footnote 10 Thus, mourning and space are much more closely linked than by a mere contextual issue, in our case the attack on the Promenade. In the same way that we can speak of a work of mourning (in the sense that the work is never finished), we can speak of a work of space. To produce, to construct space, is to experience a loss, a founding lack: ab-sense that allows the construction of meaning and spaces. In a way, all construction is a reconstruction. And faced with this background of ab-sense, all sorts of responses come to the fore, consenting to it to a greater or lesser extent, as we shall now see.

Two Examples of Objections to Doubling the Loss

While some emergences double the loss and thus possibly contribute to the mourning, others, on the contrary, seem to oppose their own loss. Let us take up our two fields: on the one hand, the urban modifications of the Promenade, and on the other, the spontaneous memorials.

As part of the official safety work, a safety cable and bollard system was installed, so that it is as invisible as possible. However, the official discourse that accompanies this installation, still 5 years later, is that it is strong enough to block a 19-ton truck. In other words, while wanting to make the site safe, the official discourse never ceases to remind us of the ghost of the lorry, of its possible emergence, even though a strict repetition is impossible. Not only is traumatic repetition not far away (the device recalls the image of the truck in a strange temporal stasis), but we can also wonder about the possibly anxiety-inducing effect of this discourse, which suggests the imminence of the lack of the lack.Footnote 11 Thus, where spontaneous memorials excavate absence in their very presence, the discourse on the cable never ceases to remind us of a possible presence where it would be necessary to circumscribe the absence. The urban response and its security discourse imposes its own objection to the collective dimension of mourning, its own opposition to the doubling of loss. But from the point of view of psychoanalytical urban anthropology, the central question remains whether and how each ‘user’ of the Promenade, each walker, will allow himself or herself to practise the cable, that is to say, to pierce this discourse, to divert it, to transform it.

In the same way, our research team followed the astounding fate of the spontaneous memorials left by the crowd following the attack. All the cities hit by these massive demonstrations of mourning have their own way of reacting to them and managing them (Faucher & Truc, 2020). In Nice, these deposits were quickly moved: first to the adjacent medians and pavements, then grouped together on 18 July 2016 under a nearby bandstand. There, they remained in the open air, accumulating for 6 months, after which they were transferred to the municipal archives. It was therefore under the ephemeral memorial of the bandstand in the Jardin Albert 1st that the majority of the testimonies accumulated, throughout the autumn of 2016, then during the Christmas holidays. Specialists agree that this situation is unprecedented in the context of an attack, as tributes are usually quickly and carefully archived. However, left outside for 6 months, all the written messages were erased by the bad weather, and all that remained were objects, mainly stuffed animals, infested with vermin and insects which, once evacuated from the public space, almost contaminated the Municipal Archives, which were literally cluttered with 90 boxes of stuffed animals, to the great dismay of its Director (Duvigneau, 2018).

Thus, the very impossibility of removing objects of significant value—destroyed by time—has led to their disappearance: one loss follows another. Where the classic work of the archivist involves sorting, eliminating, cleaning, then classifying, describing and normalising (it should be noted that all these actions are precisely a technical and symbolic treatment of the loss), it is the weather that has caused the loss, and in an indiscriminate manner. But on the other hand, all that remained were ineliminable objects that carried abjection and chaos with them, as if they carried an embodied part of the Real, overflowing and saturating the Archives. Stuffed animals, so often taken as a paradigmatic example of the transitional objectFootnote 12 by D. W. Winnicott (1969), can no longer circulate, or transit. The transitional object, whose initial role is to enable separation, becomes here a frozen, saturating object, which can no longer pass through and which, here too, we can ask ourselves what difficulties in the collective mourning process it reflects. Here we discover the variety of responses that consent to or deny this background of ab-sense around which the urban discourse is framed.

In these last two cases (safety cable and boxes full of stuffed toys) we see how the frozen becoming of these objects attempts to object to their own loss. It is here the second loss that is somehow ‘prevented’ or constantly postponed. Thus, by working on several forms of this redoubling, we can synthesise our conclusions as follows:

  1. 1.

    As a result of spatial chaos, the appearance of these new forms of spatial differentiation contains within itself an act of erasure or loss.

  2. 2.

    These symboligenic losses, although called upon each time, are not necessarily due to the same causes and therefore may not always reflect the same process. It is as if they are possible variations of the spatial forms of the doubling of the loss. Thus, the return of spatial productions would differ both in their positive manifestations, their forms and in the types of loss with which they appear.

  3. 3.

    Finally, this second loss is itself the subject of tensions, of resistance showing the ambivalence in the work of mourning.

To Conclude: Resilience or Reconstruction?

I would like to conclude with a question for debate. The importance of the work of redoubling the loss in mourning, as I have presented it here, seems to be precisely what resilience thinking tends to ignore. Indeed, the concept of resilience is nowadays used both in the field of psychology and in the field of urban research (we speak of urban resilience, or resilient city). Urban resilience is generally considered to be ‘the capacity of the city to absorb a disturbance and then recover its functions following the disturbance’ (Toubin et al., 2012). It is immediately apparent that absorbing and recovering are two operations that do not involve the assumption of loss. Thus, many researchers—sociologists, philosophers, psychoanalysts—question the epistemological foundations and implicit ideologies to which the concept is linked: cult of adaptation, imperative of performance, denial of vulnerabilities, and even political instrumentalisation (Gefen, 2020). Is the need to adapt an obstacle to any subversion? As the philosopher Michael Fœssel (2015: 19) writes, ‘if desolation does not call for a return to the past, it does, on the other hand, give rise to the invention of new discourses, new practices or alternative attachments that take their source in the recognition that something has been lost and is missing. It is precisely this recognition that the imperative of resilience obscures’. It is therefore possible that resilience thinking, whether urban or psychological, ignores the creative effects of subjectivising lack and the necessity of this doubling of loss.

Conversely, it is the reference to the ab-sense that allows us to link the urban reconstruction to the psychoanalytical construction in Freud's sense. In a famous text from 1927, Freud notes the difficulty of obtaining a total recollection of the patient due to infantile amnesia concerning the first years. He then distinguishes between two types of intervention by the psychoanalyst: interpretation and construction. If interpretation always concerns the detail (missed act, slip of the tongue), Freud proposes the term construction to name elaborations that aim to reconstitute and then communicate to the analysand a much wider panorama concerning ‘a piece of his early history that he has forgotten’ (Freud, 1927: 261). It is precisely because the analysand cannot remember everything (there is also a Real here) that the analyst is led to construct what has been forgotten, whether it be events of reality or fantasies. Freud then compares the work of the psychoanalyst to that of an archaeologist: ‘His work of construction, or if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice […] As the archaeologist builds up the walls of the building from the foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and position of the columns from depressions in the floor and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behaviour of the subject of the analysis. Both of them have an indisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains’ (Freud, 1927: 259). The analyst therefore works with fragments, with signifying shards and debris. Like the archaeologist and like in mourning, he cannot counter the loss, but he makes do with it. Every construction involves mourning. When he communicates a construction to the patient, the essential thing is not the eventual accuracy, but the effect that this intervention provokes, especially if it allows the appearance of new associations and revives the work of the analysand. It is therefore not a question of forcibly recovering a faithful and exact picture (Freud, 1927: 258) of the first years of the patient's life, but of helping him/her to better link together elements that keep repeating themselves and that structure his/her desire, that is to say, his/her relationship to lack. Here again, the construction is therefore meaning that is elaborated around an unspeakable lack: the ab-sense.

Let us think of the example of psychoanalytical construction that Freud writes in his text: ‘Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her appearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you,… and so on’ (Freud, 1927: 261). This example of construction of which Freud speaks thus consists of a narrative of a traumatic time when the subject was placed in front of the Other’s ab-sense, and the intervention proposed by Freud, while naming the Real of the ab-sense, gives it a meaning in order to veil it—and not fill it. This is also what subjective and/or collective spatial practices do, which reconstruct differentiations after their traumatic erasure, which construct or reconstruct a place. Each, in its own way, engages in a process that may or may not favour the renewal of loss and thus pay a tribute to absence and ab-sense. We might add that construction in the Freudian sense refers to the analyst's work of elaboration on scattered pieces, fragments that need to be assembled, in a bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 1962), not to fill in the lack but to define it in a different way. Many spontaneous memorials are also part of this bricolage practice, which reveals their possible function of psychic and ritual reconstruction.

Clinical attention to this ab-sense necessary to the act of construction would propose an alternative to the thought of resilience, by remaining sensitive to the doubling of loss as necessary to reinvention, but also sensitive to all the responses that are made to it (whether they go in the direction of this doubling of loss or, on the contrary, attempt to counteract it). These responses do not all open the way to the act of mourning in the same way. Urban space is a privileged terrain for observing and hearing the work through which spatial differentiations reappear, the mourning they summon and allow, that is to say, the types of loss with which they appear.