Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) (III)
Freud frames his account of melancholic psychological mechanisms — its “work” — as the solution to a puzzle, or a perceived “contradiction that presents a problem which is hard to solve” (247). The contradiction is the following: “The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he [i.e. the melancholic] had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego” (247). In short, the observation appears to contradict the expectation.
Thus, on the one hand, the many similarities in the “pictures” of mourning and melancholia led us to expect one and same cause in both — namely, some kind of object-loss. Yet on the other hand, while such identifiable losses are occasionally found in melancholics, they are frequently missing — whereas the “losses” that are routinely observed pertain, as Freud puts it, to the ego. (This is a loss in the ego’s value, hence “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (244).) Has Freud been misled by his analogy, then, into positing a unitary cause — where in fact distinct causes must finally explain no-less distinct symptoms?
Freud resolves the seeming contradiction, not by retracting the hypothesis of a single cause — object-loss — at the root of both conditions, nor again by denying observations of ego-loss, ego-emptying, and the like. On the contrary, the melancholic’s observed “ego loss” itself becomes an item demanding explanation precisely in terms of the original object-loss. At this point another “observation, not at all difficult to make” (248), comes to the rescue of Freud’s argument and “leads to the explanation of the contradiction” (248). The observation is the following:
“If one listens patiently to a melancholic‘s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love…So we find the key to the clinical picture: we perceive that the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient‘s own ego.” (248)
In this way, we save one observation — the melancholic really does suffer ego-loss — with the assistance of another observation that puts it in proper perspective. For how, after all, does this ego-loss come about? The second observation, i.e. that these “reproaches” essentially apply to another object, evokes an additional mechanism. A person suffers an object-loss and confronts two alternatives:
One may proceed directly to mourning. In this case, I consciously register the loss and, in whatever time it takes, bring my stubbornly resistant “libidinal position” into conformity with reality-testing — whereupon the liberated libido can be invested in other ways.
Or one may choose the melancholic path. I appear to accept, and even trivialize the loss (too easily, it seems), but unconsciously deny any such loss and instead internalize the object as the ego — a “substitution” that satisfies the “unconscious,” from the standpoint of which there is no difference, hence no loss to mourn.
In fact, this theoretical inference — melancholic self-reproaches are essentially unconscious object-reproaches — resolves at a stroke several melancholic puzzles: (a) why doesn’t the melancholic seem afflicted by object-loss per se?; (b) why does the melancholia evince the “additional feature” of self-reproach?; (c); why, indeed, don’t these reproaches seem objectively appropriate to the reproacher?
By interpolating an etiological stage of “incorporation” or “identification” between object-loss and the resulting melancholic “picture,” Freud is able to answer each question. Melancholics appear to suffer ego-loss, and not object-loss, because they disclaim the significance of the original loss — appearing both to themselves and others relatively unperturbed by it — while unconsciously performing a “substitution” that enables that perceived indifference. I appear indifferent to the object-loss — the death, the divorce, or the snub — because, so far as my unconscious “libidinal position” is concerned, there has been no loss: all the love invested in the object is redirected, without delay, to the “internal” object, my ego, that immediately replaces it. Freud makes this point beautifully in The Ego and the Id:
“[T]his transformation of an erotic object-choice into an alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it—at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id's experiences. When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id's loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object.’” (30, my italics)
Freud’s famous description in “Mourning,” finally, is well worth quoting at length:
“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 this loved person, the relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different, for whose coming about various conditions seem to be necessary. The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified 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” (248-49)
I will take up some implications of this passage in the next entry.