Butler, Melancholy Gender - Refused Identification (1995)

Butler points out how Freud changes his position in 'Mourning and Melancholia' in the subsequent The Ego and the Id over what it might mean to resolve grief. While in MM, Freud sees grief as being resolvable through a breaking and then re-making of attachment, he later 'makes room for the notion that melancholic identification may be a prerequisite for letting the object go' (167). However, she points out that he changes what it means to let an object go, for in his later work, the letting go does not mean a final break in the attachment. Instead, there is 'the incorporation of the attachment as identification, where identification becomes a magical, a psychic, form of preserving the object' (167). These identifications are what form the ego. 'Indeed, one might conclude that melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego itself and, hence, to avert the loss as a complete loss' (167). In other words, letting go becomes about a move of the object from external to internal, preserving the object in the ego as a way to both refuse loss and simultaneously let go. As Butler explains, 'giving up the object becomes possible only on condition of a melancholic internalization or, what might for our purposes turn out to be even more important, a melancholic incorporation' (167).