Mourning and Melancholia

Sigmund Freud

In this chapter, Freud attempts to use the paradigm of mourning in order to understand and conceptualize melancholia, a condition that we would today call depression. Framing both mourning and melancholia in terms of loss of a loved object, Freud differentiates the two by identifying the loss in muorning as conscious, while the loss of a love-object in those experiencing melancholia can be unconscious, and can include not only a person but a wider definition of the love-object.

Perhaps the most significant factor of melancholia, as opposed to mourning, is the drawing in of the libido. In both conditions the idea of re-assigning the libido in the instance of the loss of the original object is undesirable, and both conditions, Freud claims, eventually pass leaving no trace. However, specific to melancholia, the libido instead turns in on the ego of the sufferer. During this process, identification takes place. In other words, as the libido is turned inward, the melancholic creates in her own ego a shadow of the lost love-object, a process that makes the reassignment of the libido onto another external object impossible, and also one that assures the internal attacking upon the self of the melancholic. Freud writes, "In grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself"(167).

Freud goes on to further classify the state of melancholia, on its own and in conversation with grief and mourning. Significantly, Freud states that shame is a state absent in melancholia, replaced with a desire to speak and disparage the self. However, he highlights "an extraordinary fall in [the melancholic's] self-esteem, an impoverishment in his ego on a grand scale" (167). This sentiment expresses a sort of self-hatred characteristic of a working definition of shame presented in previous posts and readings on contemporary shame theory.

Significantly, Freud does not fall into the trap he is said to fall into in contemporary readings critical of his lack of attention to shame in his writings - that is, he does not misidentify shame as guilt. Indeed he makes no mention of guilt in this chapter, seeming to conceptualize melancholia as a condition separate from both shame and guilt. I would argue, however, that the level of turning against the ego described by Freud in this work does detail shame, and perhaps that a detailed look into shame instances in the patients he describes would help to assuage the sentiments of melancholia.

Near the end of the chapter, Freud discusses mania. The lifting of the states of mourning and melancholia, which, as mentioned above, Freud claims occurs after an unspecified time, is not accompanied with any degree of mania expected to accompany such a change. Rather, since the two states are so characteristically slow to change, this mania is absent.

Freud closes his chapter explicitly identifying the three conditions he has discussed for melancholia - loss of an object, ambivalence, and the regression of the libido into the ego. His discussion of ambivilance is a bit confusing. What I have taken from it is that ambivilance in the melancholic (and the mourner) exists as the afflicted experiences fury towards, and associates a lowering of the value of, their lost love-object.