Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) [1915]

Freud begins by suggesting that mourning and melancholia share a cause, namely the loss of a love object, but while mourning is considered normal, melancholia is seen as pathological. Freud explains that when a loved object is lost, there is opposition to giving up the libidinal position. However, that with mourning, eventually the reality of the object's absence wins over and the clinging to the object ceases. Freud remarks though that this is definitely a painful and time-consuming process, whereby '[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it' (245). At the end of the process of mourning, Freud explains that the ego indeed becomes 'free and uninhibited agian' (245).

Turning to melancholia, Freud makes an interesting distinction and suggests that the loss in melancholia is 'of a more ideal kind' where the loss may not actually be the death of a loved one (245). In this kind of loss, what is specific is the way that what is lost might not actually be clear. Freud explains that 'one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost' (245). 'This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him' (245). For Freud, this places melancholia in the realm of the unconscious, whereas mourning never moves past the conscious.

Further, Freud explains that this results in an impoverishment of ego in melancholia that is not found in mourning. 'In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself' (246). In other words, while mourning exhibits clear signs of an individual losing an object, melancholic individuals express a loss of ego. Freud explains that the self-reproaches in melancholic individuals are actually directed against a loved one. While in mourning the libido withdrawls from the lost loved object and is displaced onto another object, in melancholy, 'the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego' (249). In this withdrawl into the ego, it serves to 'establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object' (249).

Freud explains that both mourning and melancholy can run their courses and pass after time. Mourning's 'reality-testing' eventually frees the libido. Freud explains that 'normal mourning, too, overcomes the loss of the object, and it, too, while it lasts, absorbs all the energies of the ego' (255). Like with mourning, the process of getting past melancholia is a long and arduous one. However, Freud is less certain about how this process finds completion but seems to suggest that the process is similar to mourning - a 'detaching the libido bit by bit' (256). The process is undoubtedly different in melancholia because of ambivalence. This ambivalence is missing in mourning because usually mourning takes place after the death of an object, whereas melancholia seems to occur in less clear losses. 'In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault' (256). This same process occurs in mourning but Freud explains that the path to recovery is blocked in melancholia. The inability to settle the ambivalence towards the love object eventually leads to its incorporation into the ego. 'So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction' (257). Freud does however insist on an analogy between the work of mourning and melancholia. 'Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalance loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it' (257).