Remembering Lyra

Anniversaries are opportunities to remember, to commemorate and to symbolise significant events. They can be a time to meet in an attempt to collectively make sense of loss and to honour lost loved ones. Anniversaries, particularly those of tragic events, can help us to both memorialise and transcend past trauma.

Loss and mourning

Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s paper entitled ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) was beyond doubt inspired by events of the First World War and was published just before the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed millions. In this classic text, Freud was concerned with how human beings respond to the experience of loss. He contrasted ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia’ by detailing that they can present similar symptomatic expression of sadness, dejection and pain, but while the mourner knows more or less what has been lost, this is not always obvious to the melancholic. Complex feelings for the deceased person or hostility surrounding their death is a trauma that can be difficult to speak of, and letting go of the deceased may not be easy. This can be known in contemporary times as ‘complicated grief’. If trauma is not symbolised, it may return in various guises. It was in Freud’s 1914 paper at the outset of the war, "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" three years earlier that is especially useful for understanding the trauma. Freud (1914) proposed that remembering is not a straightforward process and does not always take the form of a memory, but might reside also in actions, in particular repetition of the past. The “compulsion to repeat" replaces the “impulsion to remember” (p. 151)

Remembering in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland’s bloody sectarian war known as ‘the Troubles’ was brought to an end in 1998 through the Good Friday Agreement, on the anniversary of Good Friday. It was a political quilting point, clothed with religious fabric that knitted together sectarian factions and for the most part brought peace (Mulligan and Moore, 2020). Despite this point-de-capiton, complex trauma of the past can still haunt a community’s subjected to paramilitary violence. Brexit discourse and the recent triggering of Article 16 of the Brexit agreement were enough to expose fears of a regression to border checks and their associated humiliations and amplify insecurities. Could this be the state of melancholia that Freud wrote about one hundred years ago: a traumatised community unable to properly remember that they are propelled to take action. Without clear political signposts ahead, confusion about how to move forward is foremost.

Lyra

Lyra McKee was an award-winning investigative journalist who wrote about the consequences of ‘the Troubles’, referring to herself as a ‘ceasefire baby’, meaning she was born after the Good Friday Agreement. She was also an LGBTI campaigner and activist who championed equality in Northern Ireland and dreamed of seeing same-sex marriage legalized. On Holy Thursday in 2019, McKee (29), was fatally shot during rioting in the Creggan area of Derry. A dissident Republican terrorist group, the ‘New IRA’, admitted responsibility, stating that McKee was not the target, but was standing beside enemy forces (Halpin et al. 2019). McKee was the victim of a terrorist act and subjected to the same fate of a conflicted culture that has not quite made with peace with its past. As an LGBTI campaigner and equality activist, McKee’s killing could be understood as representing not only an attack on progress but an attack on the embodiment of change and progress signifying political and social equality and sexual freedom. This regressive acting-out could be considered a violent expression of unconscious fear and resistance to the personal–political and socio-cultural change that the North was experiencing. Significantly, McKee was buried on the anniversary weekend of the 1916 Easter Rising and her funeral was attended and conducted by religious leaders from different denominations. She was eulogized by the presiding priest as ‘a person who broke down barriers and reached across boundaries, this was her hallmark in life, this is her legacy in death, a child of the Good Friday Agreement’ (Connolly et al. 2019).

Anniversaries as healing

As a child of the GFA, McKee’s death demanded cross-community re-engagement. Her funeral brought together religious and political factions: Catholic and Protestant ministers, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. The Real of death demands signification and McKee’s funeral had the potential for a new quilt, an opportunity to unite a community in the manner of the original Good Friday Agreement in order to bring together, refocus, unite and symbolically articulate a division. It was an opportunity for conflicting parties to come together to attempt to transform pain, humiliation and hurt into new ideals in which all citizens of Northern Ireland could share, believe and invest: ideals of peace, tolerance and forgiveness. The outpouring of feeling from the funeral symbolized the possibility of a more united future for communities in Northern Ireland in a way that demonstrated that, in a relatively short time, large sections of the community had made socio-political shifts that allowed the open commemoration of the death of a lesbian and LGBTI-rights activist (Mulligan and Moore, 2020).

We can see how anniversaries are essential not only to help us to remember, but also to prevent us from forgetting; they are opportunities to commemorate and transcend past traumas that haunt us from beyond the grave. In a reflection of Freud’s paper, anniversaries may play a key role in helping those who are mourning to represent the loss in new ways through the acts of speaking and symbolic rituals. Aligned with the crucifixion of Christ and Easter Rising rebellion, Lyra is now inscribed into the symbolic tapestry of Easter anniversary events. Events that not only share a tragedy, but were all catalysts for significant cultural change. Change that may prevent repetitions of the past and allow more opportunities for those who have lost and suffered to mourn in peace. I would like to suggest that the individual therapeutic process, too, is analogous to an event—essentially a naming of the unburied ghosts that haunt us, an identifying of them and fixing them with a name that enables us to put them to rest once and for all (Richardson, 1985). To properly remember, and then properly forget and for the ghosts of the past to be buried with honour, at last.

This post was written by Dr Nigel Mulligan is psychotherapist working with individuals, couples and groups in Dublin City. He is a graduate of the psychotherapy doctoral programme in DCU and currently lectures on the psychology and psychotherapy programmes in DCU.

Bibliography

Connolly, M., Crossey, N. and Simpson, C. (2019) Lyra McKee funeral: ‘‘Why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman to get us to this point?’’ The Irish News. 24 April. https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2019/04/24/ news/lyra-mckee-funeral-mourners-fill-st-anne-s-cathedral-to-remember-gentleinnocent-soul-shot-dead-in-derry-1605157/, accessed 4 June 2019.

Freud, S. 1912. The dynamics of transference INThe standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (translated by J. Strachey) London: Hogarth Press. 9.

Freud, S. 1914. Remembering, repeating, and working-through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis II IN: the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. & ed. J. Strachey). London: Hogarth Press. 12.

Freud, S. 1917. Mourning and Melancholia. IN: The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. (translated by Strachey, J.) 14.0 pp243–268.

London: Hogarth Press.

Halpin, P. (2019) New IRA says Brexit has provided it with opportunity—Report. April 28. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/article38057295.ece, accessed 2 March 2019.

Mulligan, N. and Moore,G. (2020) Blurred boundaries: The subject of division in contemporary Ireland. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 25, 3, 333–354. www.palgrave.com/journals

Richardson, W.J. (1985). Chapter 7: Lacanian Theory. Models of the Mind: Their Relationships to Clinical Work, 101-117