Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) (II)

We closed our last discussion with Freud’s suggestion that mourning and melancholia represent two ways of absorbing loss, or “working through” it. So Freud contrasts “the work which mourning performs” (244) with “melancholia[’s]…similar internal work” (245).

To begin, then: how does Freud grasp the “work of mourning?” This work consists in reconciling the results of sober “reality testing” — the perception “that the loved object no longer exists” (244) — with the mind’s stubborn refusal to “willingly abandon [its] libidinal position” (244), so that at some level “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged” (245). Mourning is completed only when “respect for reality gains the day” (244), and reality-testing has overpowered this refusal to acknowledge its results.

Freud’s subsequent “structural” model of the mind would, I imagine, assign the actors in this internal conflict to the agencies of “ego,” whose major function is precisely reality-testing, and “id,” where the mind’s most powerful and reality-impervious wishes are stored. Even where the ego’s reality-testing leaves the mourner in no conscious doubt regarding the irrevocability of a loss, the id — the unconscious level at which “libidinal positions” are entrenched — will withhold “acknowledgement” with all the forces at its disposal to ensure that “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged.” Successful mourning invariably takes time, then; the required libido-withdrawal is only gradually achieved. Freud’s description is worth considering at greater length:

“Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each 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…[W]hen the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.” (244-45)

If this description of mourning is correct, though, we might quibble slightly with Freud’s previous suggestion that in “mourning…there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (245). To be sure, the mourner is in some respect conscious of the loss — in a way, moreover, that the melancholic is emphatically not. (The mourner knows his dejection is the consequence of whichever loss he has indeed suffered.) But in another respect, the mourner remains “unconscious” for the duration of the mourning, inasmuch as at some level this mourner continues to believe, falsely and in the teeth of the evidence, in the enduring existence of the lost-object.

Freud now contrasts this “work of mourning” with the “similar internal work” (245) of melancholia, whose “unknown loss” — just because it is unknown — must be absorbed in some other way. To see how this is, Freud returns to the “picture” of melancholia, and to a characteristic symptom it does not share with mourning. The additional feature of melancholia, purportedly absent in mourning (at least in its purified form), is the “lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (244). While temporarily sharing the melancholic’s dejection, insensibility, and general withdrawal of interest from the world, the prototypical “mourner” is not identifiable by her self-mortification. (In fact, we will find that this distinction holds only when mourning is uncontaminated by ambivalence. But in that case, the conceptual separation of mourning and melancholia breaks down, anyhow.)

Though these self-reproaches may appear excessive or entirely unfounded to observers, Freud insists straightaway that the melancholic “must surely be right in some way and be describing something that is as it seems to him to be” (246), or that “he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation” (247). While introduced axiomatically, both the meaning and warrant of these assertions are far from evident; they are arguably more conclusions that follow from the subsequent analysis than uncontroversial premises of that analysis. In other words, we will find that the self-reproaches are “right in some way” or “correct description[s]” only when we see how they are apt. (To anticipate: these reproaches apply precisely to the lost object that the melancholic has ex hypothesi internalized.)

Here Freud interpolates a brief theoretical reflection on “the view which the melancholic’s disorder affords of the constitution of the human ego” (247) — the ingredients of which prefigure the “structural” model of the mind officially introduced in 1923’s The Ego and the Id. (In Love and its Place in Nature, Jonathan Lear notes (158) that it was precisely Freud’s attempt to explain melancholia that compelled him to innovate the structural model.) Rather strikingly, melancholia provides the sight of a mind at odds with itself: “one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object” (247). This “critical agency,” Freud hypothesizes, enjoys a certain “independence in other circumstances” (247); it is not restricted to melancholic persons but is a universal constituent of mind, “commonly called conscience” (247). In melancholia and perhaps in other conditions, this agency, “among the major institutions of the ego” (247), precisely “can become diseased on its own account” (247).

As I understand the post-history of this trope, Freud will ultimately use a single term, superego, to embrace both this critical agency, “conscience,” and that which until this point he named the “ego ideal.” It seems somehow illuminating that, at least in the context of the “Mourning” essay, it has not yet occurred to Freud even to associate to the “ego ideal,” much less conjoin it to the “critical agency” that for the time being appears sui generis.