A striking news item shakes Japan: a mother has kept the body of her daughter who died in a freezer for two decades. A staggering gesture, which questions as much about the act itself as about the psychological suffering which motivated it.
The body found in “advanced state of decomposition”
The macabre discovery took place in the northeast of Tokyo. Investigators found, at the bottom of a room, the curved body of a woman born in 1975, simply dressed in a t-shirt and underwear. According to the police, the body was in “advanced state of decomposition”.
It was the mother herself who revealed the presence of the corpse. She presented herself at the police station this Tuesday, explaining that the smell of her deceased daughter “filled the house”. She then admitted to having bought a freezer “to place her daughter’s body there”. Placed in police custody, she was arrested for “suspicion of abandonment of body”.
The body must now be autopsied in order to determine the exact causes of the death.
An “attempt to suspend time”
To understand such a gesture, we interviewed Amélie Boukhobza, clinical psychologist. His analysis highlights the complexity of such a situation.
“This ice newspaper, literally and figuratively“, She says.” For some, freezing her child’s body is obviously incomprehensible. For others, this is a way of keeping a being close to yourself that you cannot let go. “
According to her, the act translates less a simple denial than an absolute refusal of the absence. “”Of a refusal of absence, void, loss “she underlines.
The psychologist recalls the extreme violence of the loss of a child: “Death brutally ends a relationship. And nothing is more unbearable than the loss of a child. There is not even a word in the French language to name it. So sometimes the psyche clings, refuses separation, until they come close to madness.“”
Mourning, she explains, does not follow any rule. “”He takes time … but it also happens that we remain frozen, literally, unable to let go. Such a gesture escapes all rationality. He expresses unbearable pain, a link that has never been able to untie. A frozen body becomes a frozen presence, an illusion of proximity, a way of saying: “I do not abandon you”.“”
Beyond the horror of the news, the expert insists on what he reveals in depth: “But behind there is above all the raw expression of a frozen love, unable to transform itself.“”