Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) (I)
Freud begins this well-known essay with a double-analogy — that is, an analogy between analogies. Just as (a) dreams supply a “prototype” drawn from healthy life that illuminates neurosis, similarly, (b) the non-neurotic and universal experience of “mourning” may help us to grasp “melancholia” — a condition which in many respects resembles it (243). The analogy implies an idea evident in much of Freud’s writings, namely, the essential continuity between pathological and non-pathological mental phenomena. The “healthy" person’s dreams and grief throw light on the “illnesses” of “narcissistic mental disorders” and depression, respectively, precisely because the same forces and principles obtain both in the norm and the deviation from it.
In what, then, does the connection between mourning and melancholia consist? Beyond their outward resemblances, or the similar “general pictures of the two conditions” (243), Freud’s clinical observations have led him to suppose that the “exciting causes due to environmental influences are…the same for both conditions” (243). The two are linked, in other words, both by their presenting “symptoms” and their (probable) “etiologies.”
First, the symptoms — what are these, exactly? When we compare the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of persons in these two states, and abstracting from the paths that lead to them, we discover a basic identity that is nonetheless complicated by one, significant discrepancy: `
“The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and 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…The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same.” (244)
This significant discrepancy — the “disturbance of self-regard” observed in melancholy but not, generally speaking, in mourning — represents a puzzle which, in moment, Freud will attempt to address.
But before turning to this puzzle, let us ask: what type of “exciting causes” does Freud have in mind? (By “exciting cause,” I imagine Freud is referring to the catalyst of a condition, which may or may not coincide with its underlying explanation.) These are, as a rule, more unmistakable in the “non-pathological” process of mourning — the investigative appeal, again, of the analogy that begins the essay.
“Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one‘s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition.” (243)
We can anticipate that, while the “exciting cause” of melancholia may be perfectly obvious both to the melancholic and the observer, the underlying reason need not be conscious. Indeed, in some instances, as Freud will put it, “even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia,” this might be “only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). And in fact, one distinguishing feature of melancholia on Freud’s account is precisely its unconscious dimensions.
While Freud does not express his position in just this way, it seems that the “causes” of these conditions — at root the same problem of loss — may nevertheless be distinguished in two, related ways.
In cases of mourning, the immediate provocation or “exciting cause” is at the same time a sufficient explanation for the reaction. The death of a loved one, say, is not merely a trigger for mourning; it is also its entire object, hence a compelling reason for it. By contrast, the exciting causes of melancholia include such seemingly innocuous events as an unintentional snub or minor setback, which may not fully account for that reaction — in other words, there is some other reason.
Following from this first distinction, whereas the underlying basis of mourning is essentially known — the mourner is in no way perplexed about either the occasion or the essence of the mourning — the same cannot be said of the melancholic. While the latter may, indeed, be perfectly aware of, and pained by, the exciting cause of his dejection, both its underlying basis and the “mechanics” of its “work” remain mysterious, that is to say, unconscious. So Freud writes:
“This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.” (245)
Of course, the very premise of Freud’s article suggests these differences: while mourning is a familiar and relatively un-mysterious state to those who experience and observe it, melancholy is frequently puzzling, arising as it does in persons who are not obviously stricken by “loss.”
(To be sure, Freud expresses surprise that mourning is not more puzzling to both laypersons and psychologists, who accept the pain involved “as a matter of course” (245). But in this case, the ostensible puzzle relates, not to the cause or basic mechanism of mourning — to the popular notions of which Freud gives a psychoanalytic twist — but rather to the high degree of pain it exacts.)
At this point, Freud refers both to “the work which mourning performs” (244) and to “melancholia[’s]…similar internal work” (245), so suggesting that, as rule, the experience of “loss” introduces some destabilizing difficulty or problem to which one must respond. How the mind goes about resolving or “making good” the loss will determine which of the two conditions emerges. Or, more accurately: mourning and melancholia designate two strategies of absorbing loss and “working through” it — one mainly conscious, the other mainly unconscious. I will consider this distinction in greater detail in the next entry.