Concept
Mourning
The psychical response to the loss of a loved person or of an abstraction that has taken their place. In Trauer und Melancholie (1917) Freud described the work of mourning: reality-testing shows that the object no longer exists, and the libido attached to it is withdrawn bit by bit, through painful recollection of each memory and hope, until the ego is free to love again. Melancholia, by contrast, turns the loss against the ego itself. Melanie Klein later linked every mourning to the infant's depressive position.
Development
1917
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud had already said in Totem und Tabu that mourning has a psychical task to perform; Trauer und Melancholie makes it a concept, the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), in which reality-testing shows that the loved object is gone and the libido is withdrawn from its memories bit by bit, and sets it against melancholia.
In Totem and Taboo (1913);Mourning and Melancholia (1917)
Relations
- 1917 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud had already said in Totem und Tabu that mourning has a psychical task to perform; Trauer und Melancholie makes it a concept, the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), in which reality-testing shows that the loved object is gone and the libido is withdrawn from its memories bit by bit, and sets it against melancholia.
Works
- 1913
Four essays, first published in Imago in 1912–1913 and collected as a book by Hugo Heller in 1913, that compare the mental life of tribal peoples, as the anthropology of the time described it, with the mental life of neurotics. They treat in turn the horror of incest; taboo and the ambivalence of feeling; animism, magic and the omnipotence of thoughts; and the return of totemism in childhood. In the last essay Freud puts forward the hypothesis of a primal horde in which the brothers killed and devoured a violent father. Their remorse over the deed and their ambivalence toward him, he argues, gave rise to totemism, to the prohibitions on murder and incest, and to social organisation, morality and religion.
- 1917
Freud compares melancholia with normal mourning. In both the loved object is lost and interest in the world is withdrawn, but only in melancholia is self-regard lowered, so that the patient reproaches and reviles himself. Freud reads these self-reproaches as reproaches against a loved object, shifted back onto the patient’s own ego. Where the object choice rested on a narcissistic basis, the libido withdrawn from the lost object is drawn into the ego and used to set up an identification with it, so that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego. A critical agency in the ego, the forerunner of the super-ego, then treats the ego as the forsaken object. The paper also discusses ambivalence, the risk of suicide, and mania as a triumph over the lost object.
See also
People
References
- Totem and Taboo1913Evidence for a relation
- Mourning and Melancholia1917Evidence for a relation