After the Collapse: Mourning the Fantasies We Lost in Turkey

There are catastrophes that shatter the earth, and others that shatter the psychic structures we build to make sense of our lives. The 2023 earthquake in Turkey was both. Buildings fell, entire cities collapsed, and beneath the rubble, a deeper rupture emerged: the destruction of collective phantasies—of safety, of state protection, of shared humanity.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that we do not only grieve people; we grieve internal objects, ideals, and illusions. The Turkish earthquake didn’t only destroy homes—it destroyed a fantasy of the world as knowable, protective, meaningful. For many, this loss was unbearable. In the days that followed, the streets filled not only with dust and silence, but with heightened aggression, desperation, and disorientation. The social body fractured along familiar lines—rich and poor, rural and urban, Turkish and Kurdish, cared for and abandoned.

Regression Before the Quake

Even before the earthquake, Turkish society was under immense stress. Inflation soared. The economy teetered. Aggression boiled under the surface—on the roads, in everyday interactions, and in public discourse. Saluting, policing, and silencing became symbolic acts of a social superego that could no longer regulate internal or external conflict. The capacity for reflective functioning diminished. The symbolic order was already fraying. And so, when the earthquake struck, the psychic regression that followed wasn’t new—it simply intensified.

In Bion’s terms, society as a “container” failed. An uncontained, unmentalized terror filled the streets. There were too few words. Too few holding environments. No transitional spaces. Mourning couldn’t take root because mourning presumes a basic trust that the loss can be acknowledged, symbolized, and witnessed. But what happens when no one is there to witness? When the state looks away? When only the wealthy receive help?

Destruction as Psychic Repetition

In the aftermath, many survivors spoke of feeling numb, “dead inside,” or filled with uncontrollable rage. These are not simply trauma responses—they are also expressions of a deeper masochistic identification with a failed system. Freud’s concept of the death drive (1920) becomes painfully relevant here: the compulsion to repeat, to return to destruction when symbolization is foreclosed.

In Turkey, one sees this in the self-destructive chaos that erupted after the earthquake—looting, violence, scapegoating, the collapse of shared reality. Mourning was suspended. In its place: manic denial, hypervigilance, and sometimes sadistic glee at destruction, as if psychic annihilation could somehow express the unspeakable grief that had no words.

Masochism is often misunderstood. It is not simply a desire for pain, but a way of controlling helplessness. If I destroy myself, at least I am the one in control. If I rage at others, at least I do not collapse into the abyss of sorrow. This is the tragic logic that animates the aftermath of both personal and collective trauma. We see it etched into the post-quake fabric of Turkish society—especially among those who felt not just abandoned, but betrayed.

The Mourning That Didn’t Happen

True mourning takes time, and time requires containment. But in a society that lacks both containment and political will, mourning becomes fragmented. Disavowed. Or it turns into protest—desperate, disorganized, often pathologized by the very structures that failed to protect.

Freud wrote in Mourning and Melancholia (1917) that mourning involves slowly withdrawing libidinal investment from the lost object. But how does one mourn a fantasy that was never fully real—such as the fantasy of protection by the state, or the belief in fairness, solidarity, or divine justice? The Turkish earthquake didn’t only bring buildings down—it forced people to confront that some internal objects had been illusions all along. And perhaps that is the most unbearable loss.

Psychoanalysis After the Earthquake

The consulting room, if it survives, becomes one of the last places where mourning can begin. Here, we can name the aggression, the masochism, the shame. Here, we can hold the paradox: that people who are hurt may hurt others; that survivors may feel guiltier than the dead; that the destruction of fantasy may offer a bleak kind of clarity.

To be a psychoanalytic candidate in such a world is to walk this terrain with others. We are not immune. We are shaped by the same chaos, the same regression, the same seductive pull of despair. But our task is to listen—for the moment when symbolization returns. For the flicker of mourning behind the rage. For the possibility of new introjects to take root—not grand, idealized ones, but simple, grounded ones: safety, dignity, containment.

Psychoanalysis does not rebuild houses. But it may help rebuild the capacity to feel, to grieve, and to relate. And in a shattered world, that is not nothing.

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References

• Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

• Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition, Vol. 14.

• Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, Vol. 18.

• Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 585–595.