The New Danse Macabre

In her book, A Distant Mirror (1978), Barbara Tuchman comments on the Danse Macabre which she calls "a new kind of processional play on the theme of death that had lately come into vogue" following the episodes of Black Plague in the 1300's. It was often seen as a street performance " to illustrate sermons on the submission of all alike to Death the Leveler" (p. 505). She points out that the figure who leads the procession is not Death personified but "the Dead One" that is each of us, the thing we will be (p. 506). Tuchman sees this development as a response to the psychological trauma experienced by the survivors of the plagues.

Tuchman estimated that about a third of Europe died in the mid-1350's (p. 96). By the end of the century she estimates about fifty percent of the people of Europe had died (p. 119) and the Black Plague was not only limited to Europe. How might we react psychologically if this were happening to us? The usual response to loss: grieving and resolving the issues of loss seems like a Herculean task in a situation like that.

Tuchman indicates that then "emotional response, dulled by horrors, underwent a kind of atrophy" and she quotes a chronicler of the time: "'and in these days was burying without sorrowe and wedding without friendschippe.'" (p. 96). She reports that farmers became apathetic and did not plant or harvest because the had no sense of future. Tuchman quotes another contemporary source as saying "'the sense of a vanishing future created a kind of dementia of despair'" (p. 99). Some people became extremely religious and others engaged in "lawlessness and debauchery" (p. 100). Persecutions sprang up based on paranoid and unfounded fears.

In art, Tuchman notes there was the beginning of "a pervasive presence of Death in art" (p. 124). Millard Meiss author of Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951) also notes this. Death is depicted more graphically. The depictions of Christ become more horrific and bloody. Tuchman has an illustration of the effigy of Guillaume de Harsigny who had himself depicted as a skeleton rather than the idealized image seen in previous years. A fresco in the Abbey of Chaise-Dieu at Riom depicts Death dancing with everyone from the Pope to the lowest serf.

Sigmund Freud in his Collected Papers (1959) has a chapter on the mechanism of hysteria. The patients he treated and wrote about had come to deny some significant trauma which sometimes was manifest in a conversion symptom or other type of symptom. The central point was that people were reacting to a trauma and they did not consciously know what it was. They manage to deny and repress the thing that bothered them but it came back at them in a distorted form (p. 260). In his book Soul Murder ( 1989) Leonard Shengold comes at the idea somewhat differently. He says "too much too-muchness we call trauma." (p. 1) . In a traumatized state he says that sometimes "it is necessary to retreat from feelings, good feelings as well as bad ones" (p. 2) as a result of the severity of the trauma. Shengold's book is primarily about the trauma caused by child abuse but he also says " this is the century of the computer, the concentration camp, and the atomic bomb, of the presence of such destructive potential that all life on earth is threatened" (p. 4). These things too may be traumatic and not just to an individual but to a nation as whole. For quite some time the official Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has contained a diagnosis for posttraumatic stress disorder. Many people may know someone who has a posttraumatic stress disorder from Vietnam, from some sort of abuse, or from being involved in some other disaster.

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