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

We can now collect in one place the necessary and sufficient conditions of melancholia — at least of the “type” that interests Freud in the article. These conditions include

1. a loss (which might ordinarily give rise to mourning)

2. of a narcissistic object-choice

3. by an ego consequently disposed to identificatory, “regressive drawing-in of libido” (251)

4. whose attachment to that object was marked by “conflict due to ambivalence” (251)

5. who thus holds some excess of undischarged aggression

I suggested in the last discussion that, in principle, a relatively un-ambivalent, loving attachment could also be internalized without resulting in the self-abnegations of the melancholic; ambivalence is thus another sine qua non of melancholic “work.” One may question, though, whether the “type” Freud describes is realistically capable of sustaining any loss in an un-ambivalent spirit.

It follows that the intensity of self-reproach, which in extreme cases culminates in suicide, is a reliable measure of the retaliatory aggression originally — and, one can add, appropriately — directed at the “lost” object:

“The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object — if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego‘s original reaction to objects in the external world” (252)

Now, in what respect the object has been “lost” — literally or more figuratively — and, indeed, what sort of object, exactly, it was to begin with — the answer to these questions will vary with circumstances, and Freud cites situations in which the loved person has not actually been “lost” to death, or even distance, but continues to figure in the melancholic’s life. Indeed, precisely because they survive as observers to the melancholic’s plight, the latter may derive an unconscious, “secondary gain” from punishing the offending object with his “illness.” When given the opportunity, these melancholics

“still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their illness, having resorted to it in order to avoid the need to express their hostility to him openly. After all, the person who has occasioned the patient‘s emotional disorder, and on whom his illness is centred, is usually to be found in his immediate environment” (251)

In these cases, the melancholic, unable to vent his aggression directly upon its appropriate object, still manages, in this roundabout way, a certain indirect satisfaction. Nonetheless, the account naturally permits “tidier” cases, as well — say, in which the melancholic has lost an ambivalently-loved one to death, so that there is no indirect “gain” obtainable via illness (he or she is not “around” to suffer from my sorry state), but for reasons connected with this ambivalence I cannot allow myself to “know” my hostility towards the departed. I then hate the object as myself, singling out for special opprobrium those qualities that defined the lost object and which I’ve questionable discerned in myself.

(It seems difficult here to separate Freud’s argument from his “energic” framework of dynamic forces. Some “quantum” of undischarged aggression, owing to the lost object and the ambivalence surrounding it, has been deprived of its natural medium, so that it must discover some other route to expression.)

Finally, I want to conclude these reflections by addressing another, slightly perplexing element of the essay. At several moments, Freud creates the impression that mourning differs from melancholia partly according to a loss’s gravity. Whereas Freud consistently speaks of mourning death, he is more likely to speak of a melancholic suffering a “slight or disappointment coming from the loved person” (249) as the reason that “the object-relationship was shattered” (249). And certainly the range of melancholy’s “exciting causes” appear great:

“In melancholia, the occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can import opposed feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an already existing ambivalence” (251)

And Freud repeats, later on: “[T]he exciting causes of melancholia have a much wider range than those of mourning, which is for the most part occasioned only by a real loss of the object, by its death” (256).

Now, this sort of distinction sits oddly, I think, with Freud’s introductory description: “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” (243). If, that is, mourning “regularly” follows from the figurative loss of “abstractions,” then it is unclear why Freud would later restrict the process “for the most part” to literal deaths. But, even apart from these shifting descriptions, Freud’s emphasis on the range of melancholia’s catalysts does not logically preclude a similar account of mourning — why, after all, shouldn’t all losses, from the greatest to the most trivial, be mourned? (In the contemporaneous piece, “On Transience,” Freud appears to speak of mourning in this more “expansive" sense.)

In fact, most of Freud’s descriptions imply no such invidious comparisons — between lesser and greater losses — and the account as a whole hardly requires it. Most of his statements are agnostic regarding this question: “In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning” (243); “the exciting causes due to environmental influences are, so far as we can discern them at all, the same for both conditions” (243); “melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object” (245); or again: melancholia is, “like mourning, a reaction to the real loss of a loved object” (250). For these reasons, we may want to question any distinction premised on the “gravity” of the losses involved.