Zombies

Zombies. They terrified me for decades. Even seeing a trailer for a zombie movie or discussing them gave me nightmares. As I said in a previous post though they always fascinated me too. The fear got worse with the release of 28 Days Later which featured raging, lightening quick zombies. Prior to this idea I had been able to deal with my fear by thinking about how slow and stupid zombies were. I could easily outrun and outsmart them. As long as I wasn't trapped or dull witted then I knew I could beat them.
The raging zombie, the running, savage zombie was a whole different thing though. I needed time and speed which I didn't have. The fear intensified for a while. I watched the film to try and get some understanding of what I was dealing with. It didn't help. More nightmares and terror followed. If I talked about it at all people would say 'But they don't exist!'.
The thing is, zombies do exist. The living dead are all around us. When I was a teenager me and a friend used to describe others as 'dead'. This meant boring, stupid or mindless. When I got older I started to read sociological analyses of the zombie genre and discovered a whole academic discussion about what the zombies represented. One theory is that the zombie is the mindless consumer, that is why the original, classic film was based in a shopping mall. The zombie is the consumer that will consume us. We are destroying the environment, destroying society with our desires. We are not thinking through our patterns of consumption: what we buy, why we buy it.
Another theory is the zombie represents any threat to society. Immigration, disease, poverty, uncontrolled development can all be represented by the zombie. The source of infection (it always is an infection) is always unknown or uncontrollable. This is the unknown that could destroy us all.
This unknown, the so called living dead, can also be within as well as outside. This is a psychodynamic concept which suggests that in the psyche we have memories, feelings, ideas and images that are isolated from everything else. They are deprived of energy and repressed, but they continue to exist.
In this analysis, my fear of zombies is actually fear of those things inside me that I have split off and deprived of energy. When I say 'I' what I really mean is an unconscious part of me, my ego, has dealt with trauma by repression and isolation. Those memories and feelings continue to exist however, hence they are the living dead.
What I am really frightened of is unconscious material becoming conscious. If this is a slow process then it is less frightening because I have time to think and to act. My most frequently used defense mechanism is intellectualisation and this takes time to construct. The raging zombie represents unconscious material which floods at catastrophic speed and overwhelms my defenses. This is one place where the terror originates.
The other analysis of the zombie concept which captured me is the zombie as a depressed person. They are present, but not present. They breathe, eat, drink, move like a live person but they are also dead. In one type of depression nothing has meaning, exhaustion is omnipresent and there are no feelings other than despair. My mother has always been depressed. She was apparently depressed when I was born and remained that way throughout my childhood.
My therapist explained to me that a depressed mother is terrifying to the infant. She cannot care for and cannot process the feelings of the infant. This doesn't mean that the depressed mother literally cannot feed, change, handle the infant. Most do give more than adequate physical care. It means that the mother cannot be present in an attentive way to the infant. The infant is terrorized by the experience of a mother who is not 'there'; one that despite being physically present and apparently alive is psychically lifeless and unresponsive. The depressed mother is one of the living dead. She is a zombie.