This book, written within the genre of imaginal psychology, ¹presents the imaginal dimension of the mourning process. As the title indicates, it addresses itself to the images that animate bereavement, the images of the dead. Like the ancient guidebooks of Tibet and Egypt, the emphasis in the pages which follow will be upon the souls of the dead and the manner in which their existence is continued in the mind. Though medical psychology defines mourning as the process by means of which the living detach themselves from the dead, the fantasies to which the bereaved are subject and the mythologies of the afterlife distributed throughout the world belie this definition. From the imaginal point of view, the end of life is not the end of soul. The images continue. Deep inside the grief of the bereaved, the dead are at work, making themselves into religion and culture, imagining themselves into soul.

Though the graveside would seem to be the place where we let go of the dead, it is also the place where we greet them again as angels. By returning to us in our dreams and fantasies, the dead assert their lasting value. Despite the fact that they are "gone," they continue to be the assumptions which underpin our lives. We cannot continue to know our own minds without continuing to have access to their images. The psyche is created, in large measure, by the mourning process itself. The more precisely we imagine our losses, the more psychological we become. We are the afterworld in which our loved ones dwell even as they are the cultural atmosphere in which we have our being. It is not simply that they live on in us; we live on in them as well.

The psychology of the mourning process resides in experiences and fantasies which begin beyond the grave. Mythologies of the afterworld, both personal and collective, present the epistemology of the psyche, the epistemology of the soul. Ideas such as 'heaven' and 'hell,' 'resurrection' and 'immortality' cannot be left out of the equation. They are the metaphors through which the psyche carries on. Though the life of the body is subject to decay, the imagination, unable to represent negation, perpetuates a subtle body. The blood which once flowed red through the veins of our loved ones now flows as ichor through the subtle arteries of the imaginal psyche.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dachau, Auschwitz, Belfast, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem: cities of death, cities of soul. What Jung called the collective unconscious is an abyss of loss. Countless millions crowd the depths of the psyche waiting for the imagination to give them wings.² "You could not find the ends of the soul, though you travelled its every way, so deep is its logos," writes Heraclitus (frg. 45).³ The psyche is as deep and as logical as the graves from which it is resurrected. Little wonder it is so often insane. Will we ever awaken from the nightmare of history?

The way the dead appear to us in our dreams and fantasies, the things they say and do, present the logos of the psyche, the logic and culture of the mind, infinitely better than theories about the dynamic interaction of the institutions into which the mind has been mechanistically divided. The psychological complexity of the mourning process is missed if mourning is elucidated by a psychology other than the one which it is making with the dead. Mourning, we must never forget, is an intensely creative process. The bereaved must imagine their lost loved ones with the precision that makes for a successful elegy. Though bereavement has been divided into recognizable stages, no two instances of the mourning process are exactly alike. We mourn our losses differently, not merely because we are different, but because each loss is unique. The psychology of the mourning process is not exclusively a function of the bereaved; it is a function of the persons we are mourning as well. Our empathy, in this book, will be for them.

Though Freud was a principal proponent of the medical view of the mourning process, his own death bears witness to its imaginal dimension. As Auden expresses it in his elegy, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud,"

Whatever the merit of Freud's science of soul, we cannot understand ourselves today without recognizing its impact on us. Freud's theories are now an implicit part of our culture. Most of us in the present day recognize his ghost as real. Auden's observation is correct: "he is no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion." Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, in a curious way you are our father too. Present in your absence, "quietly surround[ing] all our habits of growth," you continue to be a begetter of our souls. We are haunted by what you said and did. You continue to re-write yourself through the pens of your disciples. You have become the 'mental telepathy' which you wished you would have had another life to study.⁵

Having appreciated Freud's contribution to our psychology, we must also delimit it. Other's have died as well. Many, many others. I am not merely thinking of other analysts such as Jung, Adler or Melanie Klein—though they, too, have left permanent traces upon the psyche. Nor am I restricting my appreciation to epochal individuals such as Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare and Nietzsche, or to religious figures such as Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, and Baha'u'llah—though it is true that much of our mental culture continues to be animated by their hearts and minds. I am thinking of dear ones closer to home. Fame is not a criterion for soul-making. Though the imaginal psyche has a poetic basis,⁶ it is not restricted to "the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."⁷ Any loss can be a progenitor of the psyche. Parents and friends, siblings and children—anyone and everyone—becomes, through the act of dying, a father of psychoanalysis, a mother of soul. Every loss is worthy of an elegy. All creatures great and small are worthy of at least one stanza in "that great poem, which all poets," according the Shelley, "like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."⁸

Everything we mourn is generative of psyche, generative of soul. Whatever fails, dies, or is abandoned as error becomes an ancestor of consciousness. Yesterday's sciences, for example, are today's psychology.⁹ As Jung has demonstrated, astrology and alchemy, though no longer of value as systems of contemporary science, present the psychology of the unconscious. Now that we no longer live with these systems as our truth we may acknowledge their value as psychic fictions or poetic truths. Like the fantasies into which a patient arranges the ink-blots on the Rorschach card, the exploded conventions of our earlier sciences reveal the fantasies which animate the soul. Maddening though it may be, the mind is full of images and concepts which our contemporary alchemies regard as mistaken, inferior, non-existent, or dead. Psychology itself, the discipline, the "science," is a mourning process. Its theories, as Hillman has suggested, are also fantasy productions of the psyche.¹⁰ Even when forcefully disputed they continue to have a subtle validity. A theory of Jung's or Einstein's, a poem by Schiller, a prejudice of a crusty old uncle, the "oughts and shoulds" of mother, the witty ellipses of an inspiring professor—it's all psychology. The voices live on like Auden's and Freud's, regardless of the efforts of the living to dispute them.

The living and the dead inhabit a single community. It is not simply that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Like Aeneas carrying his father upon his back as he flees the fallen city of Troy, we bear the dead on our backs as well. History is not something we can simply bury and be done with. We are surrounded by it. The events and persons of the past become categories of the psyche, qualities of the NOW. What the Church calls the "Communion of Saints" is more than a creed. It is the imaginal dimension of everyday life. We bump into the shades of the past at every juncture. Failures of performance, slips of the tongue, lapses of penmanship, disturbances of attention—countless times each day we make unknowing sacrifices to the dead. Much of what we mistake for psychopathology is unconscious mourning. Though we wish to get on with the business of living, we cannot. Our last respects are simply not enough. The dead continue to demand attention. In unmarked graves called "symptoms," those whose value we have failed to recognize rattle their chains. Until we let them into our present awareness, they cannot fully resurrect into their eternal lives.

It is not merely that the personal issues and conflicts we had with the dead linger on unresolved after death. The dead have unfinished business too, business which they pass along to us. Of course, it may be hard to recognize the current designs which the dead have upon us while we still have designs upon them. Indeed, it may be necessary to ruminate about old scores and assimilate projections for some time before we are ready to address the post-mortem issues which the dead present. Eventually, however, we must free them from our feelings about the social roles they played or failed to play in our lives and take up the larger questions in which their souls were/are tangled.

The meaning of our human existence stretches backwards into our ancestors and forwards into future generations. Indeed, the quality of the future we bequeath to our children depends, in large measure, upon the manner in which we have dealt with our ancestral ghosts. It is not enough to simply forget our late dear ones and walk psychopathically toward our own egoistic futures. We must continue to sense their influence upon our lives and to live in a manner that will have a redemptive influence on their souls as well. The meaning of life is something we find through the mourning of life lost. Indeed, the mourning of losses and the making of culture are synonymous activities. If we are to keep our lives flowing in a meaningful direction, we must become conscious of how the dead turn in their graves as we walk by over top. Dialogue and communion are important. We must open ourselves to the questions and problems in which the souls of the dead are caught, for we only become fully-generative adults by taking on the burden of our forebear's Karma. Mourning is not the process by means of which we let go of human beings. On the contrary, it is the rite du passage in which all generations join together to make human beings of one another.

Crucial to the mourning process, the process of imagining the culture of the dead, is updating the dead on our most contemporary discoveries. Indeed, we wrong our ancestors if we identify them with the letter of what they said and miss the spirit of it. Death does not mean closure. On the contrary, the dead continue to individuate their images through our imaginations. We must not think for a moment that death has sealed Freud into his Collected Papers as if into a narcissistic shell, or that Jung has become a Jungian. They are as busy as we are trying to absorb the teachings of Derrida and Lacan, Bateson and the others. In the timelessness of the imaginal psyche a huge symposium is being conducted, a symposium to which everyone is invited.¹¹ There is Jung, talking to Plato. And over there is Tolstoy talking to my Uncle Fred. All souls who are on the same level of desire sit together, regardless of the their previous location in time and space.¹² Anachronism is a mode of recognition in elegy, a law of the imagination, the meeting place of angels. It is how "eternity" is experienced as an event of the soul.

¹ The imaginal school of psychology is derived from the psychology of Jung on the one hand and from the work of Henry Corbin, the scholar of Persian theosophy, on the other. Both thinkers place the imaginal psyche in the center of their concern and recognize it as having ontological status in its own right. The archetypal psychologist, James Hillman is the leading contributor to this school. For a fuller account of imaginal psychology see Roberts Avens, Imagination is Reality (Dallas, Spring Publication, 1980).

² I speak here of "the imagination" rather than of our imagination, because I do not wish to imply that the imagination is exclusively a faculty of the living. From the perspective of imaginal psychology, the imagination has ontological status in its own right. Though it may require imagination on our part in order to perceive the dead, they do not continue to exist in imagination because we have invented them. Indeed, much of our imaginative experience is given to us by their images. This point is dealt with in greater detail in chapter three below. For an in-depth treatment of the ontological status of the imagination see Robert Avens, Imagination is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer (Irving: Spring Publications, 1980). Also, see Henry Corbin, "Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginal and the Imaginary," Spring 1972.

³ Cited by James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 24-25.

⁴ W. H. Auden, W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 217.

⁵ In a letter to Hereward Carrington, in which he declines an invitation to serve as a coeditor of a periodical devoted to psychical research, Freud remarks: "If I were at the beginning rather than at the end of a scientific career, as I am today, I might possibly choose just this field of research, is spite of all difficulties." Cited in Robert Aziz, C.G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), p. 100. In this recent contribution, Aziz takes up Freud's unfinished telepathy business in the context of a critical and, yet, redemptive reading of Jung's theory of synchronicity. In so doing he addresses issues which they polarized over in their lives and left unfinished with their deaths. This theme of taking on the interests of the dead and educating them will be dealt with in subsequent chapters.

⁶ James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Dallas: Spring Publication, 1983), pp. 6-10.

⁷ P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry in M.H. Abrams et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 1817.

⁸ Cited by Ross Woodman in The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), p. 92.

⁹ I am indebted to Prof. Ross Woodman for this observation.

¹⁰ James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 145-149.

¹¹ In the apocalyptic terms of the Bible I refer here, though in a secularized manner, to the "Marriage feast of the Lamb."

¹² Here I follow Swedenborg: "Although all things appear in place and in space as they do in the world, still the angels have no notion or idea of place and space. [In fact,] all progressions in the spiritual world are effected by changes in the state of the interiors …. Hence, those are near each other who are in a similar state, and those are far apart whose state is dissimilar; and spaces in heaven are nothing but external states corresponding to internal ones. This is the only case that the heavens are distinct from each other …. When … anyone proceeds from one place to another … he arrives sooner when he desires it, and later when he does not. The way itself is lengthened or shortened according to the strength of the desire …. This I have often witnessed, and have wondered at. From these facts it again is evident, that distances, and consequently spaces, exist with the angels altogether according to the states of their interiors; and such being the fact, that the notion and idea of space cannot enter their thoughts; although spaces exist with them equally as in the world." E. Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders, also Hell and the Intermediate State, from Things Heard and Seen, trans. (London: Swedenborg Society, British and Foreign, 1875), par. 191-195.