Mourning and Melancholia

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 In both the loved object is lost and interest in the world is withdrawn, but only in melancholia is self-regard lowered, so that the patient reproaches and reviles himself.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 Where the object choice rested on a narcissistic basis, the libido withdrawn from the lost object is drawn into the ego and used to set up an identification with it, so that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego.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.