Mourning or Melancholia?

In Sigmund Freud’s 1915 paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, he makes a comparison that is fundamental to the argument that follows. He begins the paper stating that he intends to ‘throw some light on the nature of melancholia by comparing it with the normal affect of mourning’. (251) ‘Mourning,’ he continues, ‘is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person.’ He adds an interesting addendum here to which we will have cause to return. It is not only the reaction to the loss of a loved person but can also reflect ‘the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.’ This is a paper that is a challenge to the popular misunderstanding of Freud as being obsessed with sexuality – there is no mention of sexual feelings at all. At the same time, he does employ the word libido, but in a generalised sense, here to mean something like a loving investment in a person or thing. Mourning, Freud explains, has work to do: ‘Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object.’  Mourning serves the function of proving to the grieving person that the loved and lost figure has really gone. After that, the energy, the love, invested in that person can be gathered back into the self, and redeployed to carry on living and loving. It is a long and painful procedure, whereby every element of the psyche must learn to accept the loss that reality dictates. In the late 1960s, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously delineated five lengthy stages through which this is achieved: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Freud points out that mourning and melancholia share the traits of ‘painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity’, but in melancholia there is the added feature, so important, of a ‘lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.’ Freud then argues that it is likely that the same process is at the root of both experiences – the loss of an object; however, while in the case of mourning, the lost object is held in mind, in the case of melancholia ‘the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost’, or if he is aware of whom he has lost he is ‘not aware of what he has lost in him’.

Finally, in a remarkable – and much quoted – passage, Freud reconstructs the process by which melancholia is formed:

An object choice, an attachment of the libido, to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from the loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different … . [T]he free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any specified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (258 emphases original)

To simplify Freud’s point initially, we can say that there are two types of sadness. One has a purpose and an end point. It is a way of dealing with loss that eventually sets us free of that loss. The second goes nowhere; instead of liberating us to live and love again, it condemns us to self-hatred and inaction. The loss remains unconscious and unprocessed. There is a deeper, darker complexity, to the picture of this second type of sadness, encapsulated in the haunting phrase, ‘the shadow of the object’. The melancholic has identified with something hated. The personality, the interiority of the melancholic is made up of what later psychoanalysts termed ‘bad objects’; we are victims once again of those who have mistreated us by in part becoming them.

This process not only underpins ideas about the formation of identity, but, equally importantly, it explains what the purpose of psychoanalytic therapy might be. Again, a simplified way of thinking about it is that in therapy melancholia might turn back into mourning. In a paper written the year before ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud explains what became known as the repetition compulsion. As we have seen, the melancholic is unaware of the object loss, or of its meaning, and is thus unable to become unstuck from the feelings the loss entails. In ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, Freud applies this directly to the consulting room:

The patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as memory, but as an action: he repeats it, without of course being aware of the fact that he is repeating it. (36 emphases original)

The therapist cannot merely point out to the patient what is being enacted, repeated. It is necessary, as Freud puts it, ‘to work his way through it’. He adds, ‘The physician need do nothing other than wait, and allow things to take their course – a process that cannot be prevented, and cannot always be accelerated.’ It is interesting to note that this aspect of Feud’s work has been returned to in the last few years by people with a neuroscience background. The neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, Mark Solms explains that we lay down or automatise what he calls ‘action plans’ for meeting our needs. Unfortunately, not only successful plans are automated; for Solms, such ‘illegitimately or prematurely automatised action programmes are called ‘the repressed’.’ To work on the repressed these plans need to made conscious again, as he terms it ‘reconsolidated’.

Such reconsolidation is nevertheless difficult to achieve, mainly owing to the ways in which non-declarative memory systems work, but also because repression entails resistance to the reactivation of insoluble problems. For these reasons, psychoanalytic treatment takes time– i.e. numerous and frequent sessions– to facilitate ‘working through’. Mental healthcare funders need to learn how learning works. (5-6)