Paddy’s grief - a (lightly) psychoanalytic read
(Update: Extended version up on Ao3)
Given that Paddy's catastrophic grief is such a driving force of the narrative, I want to offer a small psychoanalytic read. But first, a note on what I think their (showverse) relationship actually was, since my interpretation hinges on it and the fandom is, reasonably, not of one mind on the question. That disagreement itself is telling though, as the show does not, in fact, provide a definite answer.
What it does provide, however, is a great deal of evidence: the way the camera lingers on how they look at each other, and how much they like to; the hands, the touches, the vast smiles; the sheer indulgence of it, the camera itself performing the gaze of a lover. Except then, at the crucial moment, it looks away. No kiss, no waking up on the same cot, none of the traditional narrative signifiers of desire acknowledged or consummated. Which is, of course, also an answer.
My read, then, is that within the series universe we are led to think of them as very best friends who are perhaps slowly waking up to the deeper undercurrents of their relationship, but they are not there yet, and are possibly getting there at different speeds. The force of the longing, the overwhelming desire to look at and touch the other: all of that is obvious, and all of it can perhaps still be filed away as "this is my very best friend, my favourite person." That is true especially for Paddy, who tends toward self-absorption, frequently lost in petty battles with his superiors and the unwinnable wars of his own mind. Eoin is another matter. It reads to me as though he might even be somewhat actively courting Paddy – he's the one initiating most of the touches, and the one trying to keep the two of them together despite Paddy's best attempts at sabotaging it – and I suspect he's waiting, more or less patiently, for Paddy to finally wake up and the face the music.
All of which is just to say: I do think that we are meant to understand that they loved each other profoundly, and were indeed devoted to each other, but that the increasingly intense amorous/sexual undercurrent of their relationship had likely not been addressed.
Which brings me to what I was actually wanting to touch on…
1) “No one can bear undeclared grief”
This is the core to what I believe actually drives Paddy mad after Eoin’s death. He cannot properly account for the force of his grief; “my best friend died” (“and as a result of my own hubris, too”) is insufficient as an explanatory/meaning-giving container for the sheer annihilatory force of his experience.
But: that grief is anything but undeclared. If anything, his grief is almost scandalously declared, for a man of his time and type especially. When he is shown Eoin’s grave, Paddy cries openly in front of Reg and the other men. When they are given leave, he refuses the offer of going to Cairo with the other men and instead sets out to find and bury Eoin’s body. Nobody is confused about whether Paddy is grieving at all, or whom he is grieving for. Sure, he hasn’t gone to the Free French and said, “je suis désole, mon amoureux est mort”; but other than that, exactly no one in the unit is under any doubt that Paddy is fraying under weight of catastrophic grief. So Stirling cannot mean “undeclared” in the simple sense of hidden or suppressed grief.
But what if “undeclared” modifies not the grief but its object, or, more precisely, its nature?
The grief is declared, very much. But what cannot be declared is what the grief is really for. Paddy can say, “my best friend is dead and I am destroyed by it”. But what he cannot say – and I don’t think he can even fully think it, given the superego demands of his time – is “Eoin was the person I loved the most in the world in the fullest, most expansive sense of that word, and I will never have him, and I never told him, and now I never can.” The grief is visible, but its true referent is sealed from Paddy himself. Which means he cannot actually grieve in any complete sense; all that is for him to do is to act out the brutal force of something he has no real name for.
In psychoanalytic terms, mourning requires knowing what you have lost. You have to be able to say: this is what is gone. When the nature of the attachment is foreclosed from consciousness – the friendship acknowledged, but the all-consuming love repressed, and perhaps even structurally unavailable as category – the mourning process cannot complete itself. What Paddy experiences isn't grief in a workable sense, but more like a too tender wound that keeps oozing even as he cannot even properly locate it.
Perhaps, the more precise line for Stirling would have been: “No one can bear the grief of undeclared love.” But of course he would not say that, would he. Yet what he does say is perhaps still good enough: that the grief Paddy appears to be feeling has no legitimate vessel. The love was undeclared – even, crucially, to Paddy himself – and so the grief born from it has nowhere to land. It just keeps falling.
2) “When I go barking and howling in the night”
Of course, there is another complicating factor that makes it impossible for Paddy to face up to the grief he actually feels, and this is not merely a matter of not naming it correctly. It is the function, or one of the functions, that Eoin actually played in Paddy's life.
Keep in mind that Paddy was presented as mad long before they jumped out of that plane. He is shown to us as a thoroughly complicated man, riven through by conflicting feelings and tendencies: genuinely intelligent and insightful, but given to hubris and vanity and prone to narcissistic injury; a canny judge of character and good strategist, but reliably undone by his own impulsivity. Under psychic strain, he will intellectualise, sublimate through poetry, externalise through violence, or simply drink himself into a stupor. When you bear in mind that the strength of a defence is roughly commensurate with the wounding it is trying to defend against, it seems very likely that Paddy – even well ahead of Eoin's death – was beset by a great many emotions, many of them unbearably large.
And Eoin made it possible for Paddy to get through those emotions. Consider Paddy's gorgeous sentence: "When I go howling and barking in the night as I sometimes do, he takes me for a walk and throws me a stick."
This is almost a perfect illustration of reverie in the Bionian sense: the capacity of one person to receive another's raw, unmetabolised emotional states – what Bion called beta elements – without being overwhelmed by them, and to return them in a form the other person can bear. Eoin receives Paddy's howling, barking, animal madness without flinching or correcting, without demanding that Paddy translate it into something more appropriate. He doesn't say "you're not a dog, pull yourself together." He enters the metaphor on its own terms, which is precisely what the containing function does: it accepts the unbearable affect as it arrives and gives it back in a shape that can be lived with. The walk and the stick precisely do not dismiss or infantilise Paddy’s distress; Eoin does not try to talk him down, does not try to reason. He simply meets Paddy where he’s at, and helps him metabolise the unbearable feeling. He says, in effect, Yes, you are a dog right now, and that's alright, here is what dogs do. The affect is held, processed, and given back in a bearable shape.
By that logic, Eoin was not just a best friend or beloved companion but, to some extent, the psychic infrastructure by which Paddy remained functional. And beyond that, perhaps the only one who held any real knowledge of Paddy, and who could therefore make it possible for Paddy to see himself in something other than self-incriminating or reductive terms. We are told repeatedly by other characters that he is the madman, an allegation Paddy will gladly parrot and play into. He stresses several times that he is "unknown even to himself."
Yet to Eoin he is neither unknowable nor easily dismissable. Eoin reminds him that like Lewes and Stirling, Paddy is a dreamer. Paddy himself concedes it: when he becomes a devil, Eoin reminds him he is also a poet.
Which means that when Paddy is confronted with Eoin's loss, the cruelty of it is compounded on every front. The only person who could meet him authentically – in his emotional intensity, in his full contradictory complexity – the one person able to say I know you for who you are, and you are worth knowing, and you are much more than a madman or a devil, who held those possibilities for Paddy even when Paddy could not hold them himself, is also the only person who could now give shape to his grief. And that is exactly the person whose bones are lying scattered in the sand.
Which is why, following Eoin's death, Paddy has no choice but to become the madman and the devil in full. The one who could contain him, and hold open the possibility of better selves, is no longer there.
3) “I did not find his body”
If Eoin was the container, the beloved, the person in whom Paddy's self-regulation partly resided – then Eoin's body is the last available material form of all of that. To find it would not bring Eoin back, but it would give Paddy something to stand before, to address, possibly to speak to. It would give the love and the grief a location, which is precisely what they lack.
And so, naturally, Paddy does go out during his leave to track Eoin’s body – another insane idea, ten months later, in a huge fucking desert that constantly changes shape and absorbs everything that is left in it and then churns it out at random. But Paddy must try, and so he does, because if the desert has swallowed Eoin, then it has also swallowed with him any possibility of Paddy saying, even wordlessly, even only in his own mind: here is where you are, here is where I am, here is what existed between us.
The absence of the body compounds and mirrors every other undeclarability. Even in death, Eoin remains unaddressable.
What’s very interesting is that after Stirling pulls his knife (as he calls it) and tells Paddy to bury Eoin McGonigal in his mind because “no one can bear undeclared grief”, is that Paddy does not attack him. I suspect even Stirling expected that he would. Instead, Paddy merely sinks into himself and hides his face behind his hands and weeps silently. Resigned, he admits that he did not find Eoin’s body.
But we the viewers know what Stirling does not, which is what Paddy did instead: screaming Eoin’s name at the top of his lungs, performing a ritual of drinking and of singing and of sleeping there, but in the end, it is him screaming to an absence, not being joined in song by an absence, sleeping in the sand beside an absence, and the absence is still absolute and unnamed.
There is an interesting duality in the desert and what it means for their relationship. When Eoin appears to Paddy as a ghost in the second season, Paddy says "it was the desert where we were most easily ourselves" – and he is right. It is the site where their relationship grew most intense, where they were perhaps on the way to confronting its full expansiveness: the extreme conditions, the particular (and permissive) culture of the unit, the distance from Ireland and England and all the institutions that would make their love unthinkable, the reduction to absolute essentials of survival and loyalty and the person next to you. The desert burned away the social scaffolding that made the love previously impossible to think.
Yet that same quality – the stripping away, the indifference, the vastness – is precisely what forecloses it. The desert creates the intensity and simultaneously provides no container for it. It offers no structure within which what is growing between them could be named or held; there is no witness, no ceremony. And then, with Eoin's death and the absorption of his body into the sand, the desert performs its ultimate act: it takes the beloved and makes him unlocalisable and unburiable. It creates the backdrop for the love, but swallows the evidence.
4) “I missed you”
Two years later, Paddy is back in Ireland and Eoin appears to him as ghost. Crucially, I do not read this as a visitation; Eoin is not speaking from the afterlife. This is Paddy’s fantasy, he supplies both voices. But that doesn’t make it less: keep in mind that when he screamed himself hoarse in the desert, no Eoin appeared to him. He sings; no one joins, but he does it anyways.
Now in the boat scene, Eoin is the one who speaks first.
What Paddy is doing, two years on, is demonstrating that he has finally been able to take Eoin inside himself – not as a howling absence or an unlocatable loss, but as an internalized presence he can now think with and through and toward. The ghost is Paddy's mind finally being able to hold Eoin as a whole object rather than as a wound.
Which makes the declarations all the more significant, because Paddy is not receiving them from outside; he is generating them from within himself. When the ghost-Eoin says I missed you, that is Paddy's unconscious finally permitting him to know that he was missed, that the love was mutual, that it was real and not a distortion or a projection or a shameful excess of feeling. He is giving himself, through the figure of Eoin, the thing he could never be given while Eoin was alive because neither of them could say it. If anything, that dialogue is an act of profound self-compassion and, perhaps, even of self-acceptance.
And when ghost-Eoin says you and me – it is Paddy who knows that. He always knew it, but now he is finally allowing himself to know that he knows it.
This is also what successful mourning actually looks like in psychoanalytic terms. It precisely isn’t “burying someone in their mind” and “getting over it”, but internalising the deceased as a stable presence that the self can carry. Paddy spent two years with Eoin as an external absence he could not locate. Now Eoin is internal and available, and Paddy no longer needs to search the desert because he has found a way to carry him. The fog and the water and the fish – all that is Paddy’s psyche finding a way to bring Eoin back with him, home to Ireland.
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