Dear Dr. Freud

Framed as a letter to Sigmund Freud, this text weaves precariously between psychoanalytic interpretations of mourning and laments sung during an epidemic of an unknown disease in the Delta Amacuro rain forest of Venezuela in 2008. This encounter extends reflection on the ways that Freud, Klein, Laplanche, Nasio, and other psychoanalysts have characterized “the work of mourning,” urging att…