Election defeat: grief, anger, and the day after

Psychotherapy

On the day after the runoff: the grief of those who lost, the triumph that also unsettles those who won, and what Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, helps us understand about both.

October 26, 20269 min read

Illustration for the article: The defeat that feels personal: grief, anger and triumph after the election

Monday, eight-thirty in the morning. The elevator in an office building stops at the lobby, and two people who have worked on the same floor for years step in. Both slept badly. Both avoid looking at each other.

One of them spent Sunday night with her phone face down on the table. She turned off the TV before the vote count was over, heard some neighbor’s fireworks, and went to bed with a feeling she couldn’t name. She woke up before the alarm, with a weight on her chest and one sentence coming back on its own: I thought I knew my country.

The other barely slept, for a different reason. He got dozens of messages, sent just as many, and laughed out loud in the living room. Now he carries on his phone a mocking video he plans to send to his brother-in-law, and on his face a smile he is trying to hold back, because he knows who his coworker voted for. He feels relief, euphoria, and, underneath, something less comfortable that he hasn’t looked at squarely yet.

The result of Brazil’s runoff between Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula came out on Sunday night. This morning, the whole country looks a little like that elevator: people who don’t want to talk, people who don’t know whether they’re allowed to celebrate, and very few people who know what to do with what they feel.

It wasn’t just a candidate who lost

Anyone who loses an election tends to hear, by Monday, some version of “it’s just politics,” “there’s another one in four years,” “life goes on.” It’s almost always meant kindly. It almost never helps, because it doesn’t match what you feel. What you feel is that you’ve lost something of your own.

Freud has an explanation for this in a short essay from 1917, Mourning and Melancholia. Right at the start, he defines mourning as the reaction to the loss of a loved person or of something that has taken that person’s place, and he gives three examples: one’s country, liberty, an ideal. So more than a hundred years ago, the loss of an ideal already belonged to the same family as the loss of someone dear.

In an election, what you lose is rarely the candidate as such. You lose an image of your country, a hope that gave shape to your plans, the feeling of belonging to the majority, the confidence that the people around you thought more or less the same way. Sometimes you lose something more intimate: the idea that you knew how to read the world. That’s where the humiliation comes from, that strange shame of someone who did nothing wrong and still feels exposed. And that’s where the urge to leave the country comes from, which shows up with force in these days. Sometimes it’s a real plan, long in the making. Sometimes it’s the pain’s way of saying it no longer wants to belong to what just hurt it.

And then there’s the anger. Anger at those who voted differently, anger at those who didn’t vote, anger at yourself for having believed. It, too, is part of the loss, and it isn’t a sign of bad character.

Mourning makes the world poorer for a while

Freud describes the work of mourning as slow and costly. Reality shows that what you loved is no longer there, and the mind has to detach from it bit by bit, memory by memory, expectation by expectation. While that happens, the world loses its color. Interest fades in the news, in conversation, sometimes in things that have nothing to do with politics. You don’t feel like seeing anyone.

There’s a remark in this essay that tends to surprise people reading it for the first time. Freud says it never occurs to us to regard mourning as an illness and refer it to a doctor, even though it changes so much about the way we go through life. We trust that it will pass, and we consider it useless, or even harmful, to interfere with it.

It’s worth taking that seriously this week. Sadness, irritability, tiredness, no energy for the family lunch: in the days after a defeat, all of this is usually psychological work in progress, not a symptom. Rushing it, from the outside or from within, generally just pushes it further down the road.

When loss turns into self-accusation

The strength of the essay lies in the distinction that comes next. Alongside mourning, Freud describes another response to loss, which he called melancholia. From the outside, the two look alike: sadness, loss of interest, withdrawal. On the inside, there is a decisive difference. In mourning, he wrote, it is the world that becomes poor and empty. In melancholia, it is the ego itself.

In melancholia, loss becomes accusation. The person doesn’t say “we lost.” They say “I was naive,” “I’m good for nothing,” “there’s no place for me here.” Freud noticed something subtle in these self-reproaches: they are often complaints aimed at someone, or at something once loved that let us down, which have made an about-face and turned against the self. Anger that has nowhere to go comes back home.

He also observed that, in melancholia, a person knows whom they have lost but not quite what they have lost in them. It’s a useful idea for anyone going through an election defeat with an intensity they can’t explain. Sometimes the election touches an older loss that has nothing to do with politics: a father who was never what you hoped for, a life plan that never happened, a hometown left behind. Today’s defeat reopens the door, and the pain that comes in is bigger than the election.

None of this means that people who lost an election are ill. The distinction works as a lens, not a label. Most people go through mourning and come back. For some, the loss gets hooked onto something earlier and starts turning into self-accusation. That’s when it’s worth paying attention.

Triumph is unsettling too

The day after takes its toll on those who won as well, and that gets talked about far less.

In the same essay, thinking about the pole opposite to loss, Freud turns to ordinary situations in life: someone suddenly freed from a long-standing worry, or a long and arduous struggle that finally ends in success. The energy that had been tied up in the tension is released all at once. The person becomes expansive, talkative, full of drive, with the feeling that anything is possible. After weeks of fear, nothing could be more human.

But triumph is unsettling too. People sleep less, talk more, decide faster. And in many people who consider themselves generous, a surprising urge appears: the urge to humiliate. The mocking video for the brother-in-law. The message in the family group chat written to be read by just one person. The comment in the elevator.

That urge almost always carries the fear of the weeks before. Someone who was very afraid of losing sometimes wants the other person to feel exactly what they were afraid of feeling. It’s a way of getting rid of your own fright by handing it to someone else. It works for a few hours. Afterward, it usually leaves a more damaged relationship and a strange taste in your mouth.

And there’s what comes after the euphoria. A few days later, some people notice an unexpected emptiness, a kind of “now what?” or a new irritation with those who aren’t celebrating along with them. Triumph can also be a way of not looking at what it cost to get there.

Both at the same table

Next Sunday, the two people from the elevator, or their counterparts in every family, will sit down at the same table. And each will tend to read the other’s state as a provocation. The silence of the one who lost looks like resentment. The lightness of the one who won looks like mockery.

What’s hard to see, on one side, is that the other person lost something real, and that their grief isn’t a tantrum. What’s hard to see, on the other, is that the relief comes after weeks of fear, and that not all joy is aimed at someone. Almost everyone who has been voting for a while has been on both sides of a result. The memory of that tends to fail exactly when it’s needed most.

When the day after doesn’t end

For most people, the coming weeks will be enough. Mourning does its work, the euphoria settles, and life goes back to filling the space the election had taken over.

It’s worth seeking an evaluation when that doesn’t happen. When the distress starts taking over the day and doesn’t ease with time. When sleep disappears for several nights, whether from sadness or from agitation. When self-accusation speaks louder than sadness. When euphoria pushes you toward decisions you wouldn’t make at another time. When frightening thoughts arise. And for anyone already being treated for a mood disorder, these weeks call for extra attention together with the doctor who oversees their care.

Psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offers something here that no family conversation can: a place to discover what, exactly, was lost or gained in this election. Your vote is not on trial, and no one there is going to debate it. What matters is understanding why this defeat, or this victory, weighed so much. Often the answer lies in a story that goes back long before any candidate, and it only comes out when there’s time and space for it to be told.

On Tuesday, the two of them will take the same elevator again. Four years from now, they may have traded places.