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

I concluded the last entry by quoting a lengthy passage from the essay. It is worth repeating, since it appears to contain Freud’s considered statement of the melancholic mechanism:

“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 But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego.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)

But this account, as stated, does not yet suffice to explain the additional feature of melancholic self-reproach. There is a logical non sequitur based on an omission. If it were merely the “love” that the ego retracted from the object and reinvested in itself, then the subsequent self-reproaches would appear entirely unmotivated. One could simply carry on loving oneself as one had formerly loved the object. In the last entry, I quoted Freud comments on “identification” in The Ego and the Id, which make essentially this point: “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) (Though Freud does not in this place explicitly affirm the possibility of such withdrawal of undiluted love back into the ego, he does not discount it, either. By contrast, when Freud argues in The Ego and the Id that “the ego is formed to a great extent out of identifications which take the place of abandoned cathexes by the id” (48), he has arguably underscored that very possibility as a key to healthy psychological development.)

In any event, if the ego feels some unmet need to judge and punish itself in place of the lost object, this can only be a consequence of an original ambivalence: one’s love for the object was not undiluted, the “attachment” was constituted partly by hatred. Further, while rejection on its own may suffice to motivate retaliatory hatred, Freud generally speaks as though the ambivalence precedes the object-loss, or is somehow essential to the original relation.

The conservation of the lost, ambivalently-loved object via internalization thus exacts a considerable cost. And since, for Freud, human relations of any duration and intimacy are bound to involve ambivalence, the hazards of internalization are in fact universal. From the primitive standpoint of “archaic mental functioning,” as Jonathan Lear names it, internalization has spared the object from obliteration; as far as it “knows,” the object survives in tact. But the result is naturally double-edged. And this means, I will suggest, that we must invert Freud’s mot from The Ego and the Id, quoted above. The ego identifies with, hence sufficiently resembles, the lost object, in order to receive, not only the store of undischarged love — ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object!’ — but all the undischarged aggression as well — ‘Look, you can hate me too—I am so like the object!’ (This interpretation would perhaps yield another explanation of bi-polarity, distinct from the one Freud offers in “Mourning.” This mental state would then consist in an oscillation between depressive self-hatred and manic self-love, both of which presuppose the incorporation described here.)

Now the object, in the guise of the ego, becomes the recipient of all those feelings that formerly pertained to the lost object — including, one supposes, those of disappointment, betrayal, and frustration occasioned by the loss itself. Indeed, since, as Freud argues, “the free libido…was withdrawn into the ego” (249), where it “served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (249), one wonders how much libido is “left over” to be expressed as benign affection for the internalized object. Perhaps, that is, the better part of the positive attachment — the “love” — has been expended in establishing that fatal identification. Freud appears to confirm this reading in the following statement:

“The melancholic‘s erotic cathexis in regard to his object has thus undergone a double vicissitude: part of it has regressed to identification, but the other part, under the influence of the conflict due to  ̳ambivalence, has been carried back to the stage of sadism which is nearer to that conflict.” (251-52)

At any rate, in melancholia it is plainly the negative and not the positive affects which predominate. Freud goes as far as calling the original situation “a mental constellation of revolt” (248) — one that naturally “passed over into the crushed state of melancholia” (248), since in that case, the object against which one “revolts” is one’s very own self. Finally, then, only a relation characterized by “conflict” will, once internalized, generate the melancholic situation. Once again:

“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.” (249)

The melancholic situation is defined by an internal split or conflict, then — one part of the ego attacks another — which itself presupposes an originally “objective” reality to that split. But apart from an ambivalent, conflictual relation to the lost object, another dispositional “precondition” (249) is implied. Freud now argues that the melancholic’s strategy of regressive identification is most readily available — perhaps, indeed, it is only available — to a narcissistic mind (249-250).

Among the “preconditions” (249) of this outcome is, paradoxically, both “a strong fixation to the loved object” (249) and an “object-cathexis” with “little power of resistance” (249). Somehow the melancholic’s initial “strong fixation” to the object does not preclude his rapidly abandoning all (conscious) attachment to that object the moment it is lost. By contrast, in normal mourning, the object-cathexis displays considerable “resistance” which is only gradually overcome, through persistent reality-testing.

Hence the melancholic’s ease in abandoning an object-cathexis is, Freud supposes, both a measure of its fragility and a sign of its provenance. Only a “fixation” established on a narcissistic foundation will dissolve so quickly. Or again: the reason that a “real” object can be replaced with minimal exertion, through “identification” with it, is that the original “fixation” had a narcissistic, “identificatory” nature. If I love someone in an essentially narcissistic manner — owing to the qualities in them that I either possess myself, or that I value and would like to possess myself — then nothing prevents me from simply “substituting” an inner object for the lost outer one, and everything encourages it. For that outer object, the bearer of my “strong fixation,” was only ever a placeholder for the pieces of myself I guilelessly projected onto it.

By contrast, this account implies that non-narcissistic object-cathexes cannot be processed through identification, but must be properly mourned. Since, that is, the object is loved, not because of its (actual or potential) resemblance to me — either my ego or ego-ideal —then it will not do, once it is lost, simply to “identify” with it and relate to “the ego as altered by identification” in its place. That substitution would not deceive or appease the mind, since the object it lost was essentially “other.”

These ideas suggest a developmental schema. The normal course of development escorts the mind from original or “primary” narcissism, through its first, identifcatory object-choices, to — in heathy cases — mature love-relations. Those who stall at the second stage, however, are capable only of “the narcissistic affections” (249), and are then, it seems, especially prone to “regression from one type of object-choice to original narcissism” (249). Thus the melancholic, in whom a “predominance of the narcissistic type of object-choice” (250) is encountered, succumbs easily to “regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism” (250) — from investment in one self-facsimile  (the external object that resembles me) to another (the internal object, or ego, that fills the vacancy left by the external object’s departure).