Repeating and Remembering
Repetition and creativity in “The Boy and the Heron”
[This article contains spoilers]
Pain is oftentimes too difficult to face head-on, and this is particularly true of a certain kind of pain we call ‘trauma’. Freud early on said that what we cannot remember, we are fated to repeat. Namely, what happens when we face an event so difficult that it extends beyond our capacity to make meaning from it; i.e., to make it speak.
Traumatic injuries, from natural disasters to abuse to the death of a parent at a young age, are just those memories that Freud evokes: ones that we cannot remember exactly, so we have to repeat it (in action). This is the crux of psychoanalytic treatment in some sense — how can one speak about that which one cannot speak? This classic Wittgensteinian moment of our psychic lives is opened up beautifully in Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023).
Just Like Mom
To put it simply: loss is trauma, and vice versa. This is not to valorize loss or to minimize trauma. Loss in the psychoanalytic sense means something more than simply losing your wallet or keys. It evokes a deeper sense of a basic existential lack that we all carry with us; something deep inside of us which reverberates through our whole being with the message: “You are incomplete.” While different psychoanalysts…
