Open City

by Teju Cole

In Mourning and Melancholia and, later, in The Ego and the Id, Freud suggested that, in normal mourning, one internalizes the dead. The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong, this benign internalization does not happen. Instead, there’s an incorporation. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living. The neatness of the line we had drawn around the catastrophic events of 2001 seemed to me to correspond to this kind of sectioning off. There had been great heroism, of course, though, as the years passed, it had become clear that aspects of this heroism were overstated. There was firmness of purpose, too, in the language of the president, there was certainly political squabbling, and there was a determination to rebuild right away. But the mourning had not been completed, and the result had been the anxiety that cloaked the city.