More than anything else in society, mourning must be diluted and distilled; the corpse is beautiful and the "hardened survivors" odor free. Alongside this disturbed relationship to the dead, mass media culture conducts that endless work of mourning Freud called melancholia. ... The cult of the dead in any given culture is coextensive with the media extensions of the senses current in that culture. Psychoanalysis, our culture's institution of mourning, keeps open lines of communication with the deceased which are precisely lines of telecommunication. Freud's disinterment of the phantom voices of the superego, for example, coincides with the advent of phonographic or radio recording...just as photography and film project and animate those phantoms which, in Totem and Taboo, haunt those who are unable to grant the .