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Ghosts Are Real, By Stephen Frosh

Decent Essays

The psychoanalysist, Stephen Frosh, argues ghosts are real, ‘manifestations of actually existing present tense losses...They happen because there are people who are made ghostly by the silencing of their voices’ (2013: 4). I have been thinking about writing about the Westgate Bridge collapse for many years, and though I have resisted, it has been impossible to dismiss. It is a kind of haunting : To be haunted is more than to be affected by what others tell us directly or do to us openly; it is to be influenced by a kind of inner voice that will not stop speaking and cannot be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going peaceably on our way. It is to harbour a presence that we are aware of sometimes overwhelmed by, that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope that that will not let us be. (Frosh 2013:2-3) For Frosh ‘psychoanalysis and haunting go together’ because ‘psychoanalysis intentionally stirs up demons’ (3). The same might be said of fiction writing, at least for this writer, haunted by those ‘things that are left over from past happenings or left out of conscious recognition’ (3). Among the many arguments I had with my mother over the years, there was the one about not stirring up the past. ‘Stop writing,’ she demanded after having a cousin read her a memoir piece I had published in The Age, ‘Why can’t you just remember the good things?’ My mother was a storyteller too, but in her stories she remade people to into

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