Death of the Queen – an opportunity for collective mourning

I am writing this editorial as people in the United Kingdom and others across the world mourn the death of an exceptional monarch. Bernadine Bishop’s psychoanalytic study of Shakespeare’s Lear and Prospero (2001) and her insight about the significance of royal figures who, in our struggles to achieve maturity, represent ‘whatever sense we may have of our share of responsibility for the world’, and ‘that what we are born into also belongs to whom we are’. The Queen’s death thus offers an important opportunity to mourn the accumulation of the trauma of climate change, the pandemic, continuing wars, and the increasing nuclear threat which our world suffers. These traumas resonate with themes in some of the papers in this issue. We have a contribution about climate change and a report of a conference from the Ukraine, both written before the Ukrainian invasion. The authors of the latter paper have since added a coda in which they sorrowfully acknowledge that their paper’s title which includes ‘Life and Death’, referring to the precarious state of psychoanalytical societies in the Ukraine, is no longer a metaphor but has become the reality of their daily lives. Sally Weintrobe, one of the authors of the paper on climate change, in a recent talk in July for the online Political Mind Series, linked neo-liberalism and the promotion of an uncaring society with the disavowal of the dangers of climate change and the nuclear threat. Segal (1987) wrote a pioneering psychoanalytic warning about the denial of the nuclear threat, and gave a paper (Segal, 2003) about it for this journal’s conference which was held in response to the imminence of the invasion of Iraq. The paper outlined how anxieties about nuclear weapons ‘convert the normal fear of death to unnameable terror of annihilation without symbolic survival’, and together with internal and external evidence of our destructiveness lead to psychotic defences including manic triumphalism and megalomania. The pandemic is a concrete reminder of the destructiveness we pose to one another, the life and death inequalities we perpetuate in our civilisation and, during the brief glimpse in lockdown, of our pollution and destruction of the planet and the natural world. I see the Ukrainian war as yet another flight into fight, a flight from the dread of facing sorrow, remorse and the need to take reparative action for one another and for our planet. The first of the three main papers reminds us of the importance of collective mourning and facilitating it when we can. ‘Reconstructing Meaning After Psychodynamic Practice, 2022 Vol. 28, No. 4, 333–336, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2022.2133834