Mourning and Melancholia

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"MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA"

The manuscript of "Mourning and Melancholia" dates from 1915, but the paper was not published until two years later. In this short, rich article, Freud described the essence of melancholia by comparing it to the normal affect of mourning. He distanced himself from the psychiatric perspective he had once adopted in "Draft G" of the Fliess papers (1950a [1895]), while emphasizing that the concept of melancholia had many aspects (especially somatic ones) that he would not examine. Methodologically speaking, here as so often we encounter Freud's continual effort to clarify the psychopathological by reference to the normal (as for example with dreams, jokes, or parapraxes).

This essay is a direct pendant to Freud's "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c), a context that helped him characterize melancholic regression (see Otto Rank, as cited by Freud in relation to the narcissistic basis of object choice.). Freud also made use of the ideas of Karl Abraham (to whom he submitted the first draft of the paper for comment) concerning cannibalistic orality and the ambivalence of the bond that lies at the origin of melancholia. He also developed the concept of identification ("incorporation" for Abraham) and advanced the notion of the work of (normal) mourning (Trauerarbeit ) on the model of the dream work (binding). The period during which he developed his ideas on mourning, that of the First World War, was particularly significant for Freud.

Freud's definition of mourning is very broad, comprising, aside from the reaction to the loss of a loved one, reactions to any substituted abstraction (father-land, freedom, ideal). This conception, which is connected with that of abandonment being sublimated as an abstract idea, is not developed further, but it does introduce sociopolitical perspectives of considerable importance.

Freud stressed an economic definition of mourning (loss of interest in the outside world) and the work of grieving as it acts on the binding of painful memories, an ego activity quite unrelated to the attenuation stemming from the forgetfulness associated with the passage of time. He immediately discusses the similarities with, and above all the differences from, melancholia, which is characterized by an apparently unjustified loss of self-esteem. "In mourning the world has become impoverished and empty, during melancholia, it is the ego itself" (p. 246). However, melancholic self-depreciation is actually directed at the love object itself. For this was the cause of disappointment for the subject, who, instead of withdrawing cathexis, unconsciously identifies with the now-hated object to which he remains ever more firmly attached. This pathological development stems on the one hand from the narcissistic nature of the initial object choice, which by its nature promotes narcissistic regression, and on the other hand from the ambivalence of the choice and the predominance in it of the sadistic impulse, which here assumes masochistic form, while directly tormenting the patient's entourage. This helps explain suicide as a redirection toward the self of a murderous impulse originally directed at others. Reversion to mania is likewise explained, in economic terms, as a sudden release from the psychic charge maintained by melancholia.

But in melancholia as in mourning, it is essentially the work consisting in finishing with the object (by degrading it or declaring it dead) that will "strike dead" the dead and release the subject. This theory of melancholia is clinically important in considering the different forms of depression. It has also been confirmed by a number of anthropologists and embodies some of the ideas Freud set forth in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a). The notion of identification was further developed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). Thus "Mourning and Melancholia" occupies a central position for both individual and group psychology.

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Abraham, Karl; Depression.

Source Citation

Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917g [1915]) "Trauer und Melancholie," Intern. Zschr. ärztl. Psychoanal 4, p. 277-287; G.W., 10, 428-448; Mourning and melancholia. SE, 14: 243-258.