Failures in the Psychic Work of Grief: a Psychoanalytic Perspective on Edgar Poe's Poem "The Raven"

The subject of grief occupies a special place in psychoanalysis, not only as a subject of theoretical interest, but also as an area in which psychoanalytic thought comes into contact with the limits of experience, with what cannot be expressed directly. Psychoanalysis views grief as a necessary mechanism for adapting to loss, but also emphasizes that in some cases this process can be disrupted. This paper is devoted to a psychoanalytic understanding of the phenomenon of grieving and the reasons why this process may be interrupted or not completed. The main attention is paid to pathological forms of grief, arising in conditions of impossibility to symbolize the loss and its full-fledged psychic processing. Edgar Allan Poe's poem “The Raven” is chosen as the material for analysis. On the basis of the works of Z. Freud, K. Abraham, M. Klein, W. Bion, A. Green. Bion, A. Greene, J. Kristeva and other authors demonstrate how the poem represents pathological forms of grieving. Through the study of the writer's biographical data, symbolism and sound structure of the text the signs of psychic fixation on loss and the impossibility of its transformation are revealed. The work aims to reveal the underlying patterns of disturbed grieving and demonstrates how psychoanalysis helps to conceptualize and express the complex experience of loss.