DEAR DR. FREUD

Framed as a letter to Sigmund Freud, this text weaves precariously between psychoanalytic interpretations of mourning and laments sung during an epidemic of an unknown disease in the Delta Amacuro rain forest of Venezuela in 2008. This encounter extends reflection on the ways that Freud, Klein, Lapl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCultural anthropology Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 312 - 343
Main Author BRIGGS, CHARLES L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Wiley 01.05.2014
American Anthropological Association
Subjects
21st century
Anthropological research
Attention
Audiences
Burials
circulation
Cultural anthropology
Death
Deaths
Delta Amacuro
Epidemics
epidemiology
Freud, Sigmund
indigeneity
Laments
Latin America
Mourning
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
Poetics
Politics
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysts
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
rabies
Rainforests
Scholarship
Sigmund Freud
Translations
Venezuela
Latin America
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Summary:Framed as a letter to Sigmund Freud, this text weaves precariously between psychoanalytic interpretations of mourning and laments sung during an epidemic of an unknown disease in the Delta Amacuro rain forest of Venezuela in 2008. This encounter extends reflection on the ways that Freud, Klein, Laplanche, Nasio, and other psychoanalysts have characterized “the work of mourning,” urging attention to the poetics, acoustics, and bodily materiality of lamentation. Focusing on a meeting that took place just before the burial of a young man, it explores claims made by lamenters on audiences, interpellating them into particular modes of listening and demanding attention to the politics of the circulation of images of lives and deaths. This intersection between psychoanalysis and lamentation provides a challenge to rethink the nature of anthropological research and writing.
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ISSN:0886-7356
1548-1360
DOI:10.14506/ca29.2.08