The Psychologist, Saint George, and the Dragon

ACADEMIA Letters The Psychologist, Saint George, and the Dragon Lonny Douglas Meinecke In pace requiescat, dilectæ (Rest in peace, beloved wife) When the average man loses his wife to cancer, 10,000 questions take her place. But when a man of science loses his wife to cancer, 10,000 reasons take her place (Myrin & Redman, 2011). Why his wife? Will he ever see her again? What was here, which is no longer here? A degreed psychologist, of all people, should be able to skip the first four stages of grief, accept his loss stoically, and move on (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005). Oddly, psychologists and neurologists find such things unbearable . . . knowing all too well what challenges lie ahead (Sacks, 2009). It is said that even Freud, famous at the time for sage advice on grief, was himself inconsolable when his own beloved Sophie, and especially her 4-year old son Heinele, died unexpectedly (Ellis, 2018; “Halberstadt-Freud, Sophie,” 2005). This essay is about loss. It will attempt to describe what is no longer here, when someone who must never die, dies. The first task is to figure out what was here. The second task is to figure out what remains. The third and final task is to ask what wasn’t here before, so that those who fight dragons like Cancer today, will not fight Regret in the looking glass tomorrow (Bradbury, 2008; Meinecke, 2013; Numinous Games, 2019). What was Here? The first task is to figure out what was here. It isn’t easy to define what was here, because after people lose someone they couldn’t imagine losing, remembering is very hard to do. Her presence, her face, and her influence on everyone, like so many things in life, seem to flee from Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Lonny Douglas Meinecke, [email protected] Citation: Meinecke, L.D. (2021). The Psychologist, Saint George, and the Dragon. Academia Letters, Article 466. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL466. 1 the struggle to recall them. Jung, a noted collaborator of Freud’s, spoke of this tendency for memories to fade (or resist coming to mind) if neglected for too long (Evans, 1957). Nearly 400 years ago, the religious predecessors of psychoanalysts were already wondering why everything precious flees (Marchant, 1646). They asked, Qui fuit?1 (who or what was here?). The answer was and still is, that everything that mattered was here, and now it’s missing. Spinoza (2012) once called that missing piece the complete idea of God. Everything except the idea of God—a constant sense of comfort—seems to flee (Meinecke, 2019). Researchers in the past have tried to weigh the soul before and after death, to see what was here (Siegel, 1980). Psychologists today try to weigh the mind before and after its anomalies have been exorcised scientifically, to see what was here (Wade et al., 2008). But the very idea of here avoids definition, let alone the task of articulating what was here. For this author, what’s missing is what he should have spent more time with before he lost it . . . like his spouse, his daughter, and his world (Markey & Meinecke, 2020). Time grants people just one chance to realize how priceless things really are, because every moment together matters (Backus et al., 2014). So, what was here? Whatever people felt a part of was here. Everything people knew was here. Whatever made them feel complete is now missing. What Remains? The second task is to figure out what is still here. What survives is still here. What survives may not know what was here, but it does understand what remains—that it will never be whole again (Ellis, 2018). How different this is from the idea of survival. What’s missing is suddenly “too absent to ignore” (O’Grady & Meinecke, 2015, p. 1). It’s like a limb abandoned by its tree. It aches. It thirsts. It cries out (John 19:28, KJV). But if less remains, where does this new grief come from? Perhaps grief seizes this opportunity to exist by filling the emptiness? Maybe painful memories start impersonating whatever was lost, accusing the survivor of losing them? Such mental simulacra, as Baudrillard and Glaser (2014) called them, might even grow weary of waiting, and start impersonating things before they are lost (Meinecke, 2017). This is not a new idea; Freud himself wrote of a “special agency” that lets the ego take the place of forsaken objects (Freud, 1917, p. 249). It seems equally feasible that verbal behavior (spoken thought) is more than just behavior 1 Qui fuit is Latin for “Who/what was?” The Renaissance author was asking the reader, what doesn’t stay? In the author’s dissertation, he wrote: “Marchant (1646) put it so poignantly—with the words ‘Fugit infantia, fugit pueritia, fugit adolescentia, fugit juvenius, fugit senectus’ (p. 129). These words, translated, remind the reader that infancy flees, childhood flees, adolescence flees, youth flees, and old age flees” (Meinecke, 2017, p. 174). Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Lonny Douglas Meinecke, [email protected] Citation: Meinecke, L.D. (2021). The Psychologist, Saint George, and the Dragon. Academia Letters, Article 466. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL466. 2 (Skinner, 1957). Perhaps a word or a story pretends to be what it symbolizes when people lose what that symbol stood for—to safeguard its neuronal survival in the mind (Meinecke, 2017, 2018a, 2018b; Wiesel, 1982)? After all, scavenging is very common in Nature. Why couldn’t something people mistake for mental or verbal phenomena have evolved to scavenge common feelings like sorrow (to avoid neuronal pruning)? It could feed on existing physiological processes in the guise of lasting thoughts like guilt, or lasting intentions like revenge (Meinecke, 2017; O’Grady, 2012). What remains? Perhaps the question isn’t what remains. Perhaps the question is what wasn’t here before? What is pretending to have survived? What Wasn’t Here Before? It seems to follow from the prior that the task isn’t to figure out what was here, nor what remains, but what is here now that wasn’t here before. Whatever that is, it hurts. It’s angry. It was accustomed to being cared for. Anguish wasn’t here before; a grave loss was not at stake. A scholar’s mind begins to ask whether anguish is something people feel or whether anguish is the thing itself, trying to bargain its way out of admitting loss (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005). Maybe unremitting grief is the defiant half of a broken covenant—like a severed limb that is expected to die but whose cells are still alive? It is a cry for help that cannot speak. It is a demand for justice from a martyred lamb (Meinecke, 2018a, 2018b). Breakout scientists have shown that amputation is not the end of a lifelong attachment (Ramachandran et al., 1995). The languishing neurons continue to search for their phantom limb—while that severed limb must be screaming “Come back for me!” Like an abandoned fetus watching its mother walk away, what survives depends on the definition of survival (R. Delarose, personal communication, November 20, 2016). In some ways, it is the survivor who is pruned away, and the lost limb which is finally at peace. The widowed psychologist, like the widowed minister, weeps “Ubi es, vox dilecti mei?” (where are you, voice of my beloved? Song of Solomon 6:1, KJV). After a long silence, his spirit groans, “Kyrie eleison!” (Lord, have pity!). And finally, when no answer comes, ten thousand voices whisper, “Don’t worry, we are still here, beloved husband” (what some call Elohim). Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Lonny Douglas Meinecke, [email protected] Citation: Meinecke, L.D. (2021). The Psychologist, Saint George, and the Dragon. Academia Letters, Article 466. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL466. 3 Conclusion What is grief? What is here that wasn’t here before? Grief is a broken URL that once pointed to the definition of sorrow; grief is a child crying “Marco!” who will never hear his lovely playmate giggle “Polo!” again. Grief is only here because, around the age of two or so, humans are taught strange things, such as to pretend that things in the real world which are no longer there, are still there (Rochat, 2003). This unfortunate learning is called object permanence (Munakata et al., 1997; Pepperberg et al., 1997). It lets people set things down and expect them to stay there until they get back, which is what they do when they leave each other for work each morning, only to discover that their partner isn’t there when they get back. It lets people make-believe they are together while they spend most of their lives apart, which is what they call a job. It’s also why they miss each other so terribly—when one of them dies before the other, and the surviving spouse wails, “Come back for me!” (Zisook et al., 1998). It is generally understood that grief arises from the collective anguish of many living cells—whose unseen referent often dies before they do, just like a widower’s wife (Gündel et al., 2003). That’s because objects in the real world do not live forever, whereas cognitions in the make-believe world of the mind cannot grasp the idea of mortality (Meinecke, 2017). Like valiant cowards in a kingdom of pure perseveration, thoughts taste death many times before their host’s death (Shakespeare et al., 2011). And when the things those thoughts cherished for so long stop replying, a new right arm or lifelong companion must be found, and grafted in. The insensible cycle of hunting, holding, and losing associations goes on and on in each thought people think inside, like a lonely woman who reads romance novels each night, to imagine the many lovers she will never hold. This psychologist’s beloved did. Then she died. So, when a psychologist loses his wife to cancer, in true scientific fashion he usually does it again to make sure he is not simply having a bad dream. He loses a thousand wives to a thousand reasons—to discover just one. He tilts at windmills and battles dragons like a wizened Saint George on an exasperated steed. He loses to the dragon he nicknamed Cancer every time (Numinous Games, 2019). 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