Article
Mourning and Melancholia
Trauer und Melancholie
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 In both the loved object is lost and interest in the world is withdrawn, but only in melancholia is self-regard lowered, so that the patient reproaches and reviles himself.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 Where the object choice rested on a narcissistic basis, the libido withdrawn from the lost object is drawn into the ego and used to set up an identification with it, so that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego.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.
What it shows
- 1917
Sigmund Freud introduced Mourning
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the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), in which reality-testing shows that the loved object is gone and the libido is withdrawn from its memories bit by bit, and sets it against melancholia.
- 1921
Sigmund Freud developed Identification
After describing narcissistic identification with the lost object in melancholia (1917), Freud devotes a chapter of Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse to identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, distinguishing three forms of it; in 1923 he holds that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.