Stephen M
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
Int J Psychoanal. 1998 Dec;79 ( Pt 6):1173-94.
The author argues that Melanie Klein's theories of mourning shed light on certain funerary practices encountered widely in ethnographic literature, namely 'second burial'. Pointing out that the death of a loved person is experienced in fantasy as the destruction of the internalised mother imago, the author shows how various Kleinian processes involved in infantile fears of maternal loss--such as persecutory anxiety, guilt, depression, and attempts at reparation--are clearly expressed in rituals of mourning cross-culturally. The argument is illustrated with two extensive case studies, Bali (Indonesia) and the Mekeo of coastal Papua New Guinea. A number of other cultures are considered briefly to indicate the relevance of Kleinian theory to the symbolism of death rituals more broadly, including the role played by sorcery and witchcraft beliefs, fears of malevolent ghosts, repeated re-burial, mortuary gift exchange, cremation, mortuary cannibalism, and the denial of death in modern western funeral rites.
作者认为，梅兰妮·克莱因的哀悼理论有助于理解民族志文献中广泛存在的某些丧葬习俗，即“二次葬”。作者指出，在幻想中，所爱之人的死亡被体验为内化的母亲意象的毁灭，并展示了婴儿对母亲丧失的恐惧所涉及的各种克莱因式心理过程——如迫害焦虑、内疚、抑郁和修复尝试——如何在跨文化的哀悼仪式中清晰地表现出来。文中通过印度尼西亚巴厘岛和巴布亚新几内亚沿海的梅克奥这两个详尽的案例研究对此观点进行了阐释。还简要探讨了其他一些文化，以更广泛地表明克莱因理论与死亡仪式象征意义的相关性，包括巫术和魔法信仰所起的作用、对恶鬼的恐惧、反复的二次葬、丧葬礼物交换、火葬、丧葬食人以及现代西方葬礼仪式中对死亡的否认。
