Aberrations of Mourning

Originally published in 1988 as Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), this resurrection of Rickel's first book about mourning and melancholia attempts to answer Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's call in Dialectic of Enlightenment for a "theory of ghosts." Drawing on a background in German philology and anticipating his eventual training as a psychotherapist, Rickels analyzes several mostly German modernist writers--Freud, Nietzsche, Kafka, Karl Abraham, Antonin Artaud, G.E. Lessing, Gottfried and Helen Keller, Aldalbert Stifter and Karl Kraus mainly--for clues about changing attitudes and practices surrounding death, loss and preservation in an age increasingly dominated by telecommunications and mechanical reproduction. To that end, Adorno and Horkeimer's "culture industry" critique and Marshall McLuhan's ideas about media appear often. Early psychoanalysts like Freud and Abraham are the main sources for psychoanalytic interrogation, but the challenges later French post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze brought to psychoanalysis and traditional Oedipal structures are important for him too. Through-out the book, he relates his study of technology and phantoms to Melanesian "cargo cults" that blend modern technology with aboriginal animism. This edition contains a new preface. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)