Mike Becker 2/12/23 Mike Becker 2/12/23

Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) (I)

Freud’ frames his “Constructions” essay as a rebuttal to critics charging psychoanalysis with a bankrupt epistemology — one that, as Karl Popper will later argue, cannot be falsified. Psychoanalytic interpretations are, so runs the criticism, impervious to refutation: either the patient affirms the analyst’s interpretation explicitly, or else rejects it — that is, evinces a “resistance” that likewise ratifies the analyst’s conjecture (257).

What Freud emphasizes in the piece, however, is that — in point of fact — neither the patient’s “Yes” nor his “No” counts for very much in assessing an interpretation’s truth-value. Authentic validation emerges, if it emerges, only indirectly, in the form of a certain “fecundity” in the patient’s productions in response to the intervention: associations, dreams, fantasies, transferential behaviors, and — if all goes well — a remission of symptoms. Far from retreating to the unfalsifiable standpoint, as one unnamed critic puts, of “Heads I win, tails you lose” (257), psychoanalysis looks past both heads and tails, in favor of evidence that enjoys a certain “independence” from the passing views of analyst and patient alike.

Before coming to this rebuttal, though, Freud clarifies the more general problems and aims involved. To what sort of object, after all, do these “interpretations” properly apply? What, indeed, is the motivation for these interpretations in the first place? To answer these questions, Freud reminds us that the central objective of psychoanalysis consists in “inducing the patient to give up the repressions…belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition” (257). In the service of this objective — the lifting of repressions — the patient must somehow “be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten” (257-8). It is remarkable how closely these 1937 descriptions of the psychoanalytic program match those contained already in the 1905 Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud’s account of Dora:

“Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient's memory. These two aims are coincident. When one is reached, so is the other; and the same path leads to them both” (11)

In short, our objective is to lift the patient’s repressions. But this, paradoxically, involves the recovery of precisely those memories which have been repressed. How, then, does one go about generating these affect-laden recollections — the sine qua non of psychoanalytic progress? How does analysis help the patient recover what has by stipulation been repressed, hence what is not directly accessible to memory?

Analysis must look, in fact, to a range of materials, above all the patient’s “symptoms and inhibitions” (258) which, Freud argues, are in reality “a substitute for these things that he has forgotten” (258). “All kinds of things,” in fact, contribute to the analytical “reconstruction” of a biography otherwise blocked from view: dreams, associations, and repetitions in behavior “both inside and outside the analytic situation” (258) — most notoriously in the “relation of transference…established towards the analyst” (258). On the basis of all this “raw material,” which the patient “put[s] at our disposal” (258), the analyst may gradually “put together what we are in search of” (258). What we want to “reconstruct,” then, is “a picture of the patient’s forgotten years” that is “alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete” (258).

This, then, is the central “task” which falls to the analyst, namely, “to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it” (258-9). Just as the “archaeologist’s excavation” (259) recovers structures buried and lost, while piecing together the whole on the basis of often incomplete remains, so the analyst, through the “work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction” (259), likewise “draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behavior of the subject of the analysis” (259).

After developing a number of analogies (259-260) between archaeological and psychoanalytic “reconstructions” (while allowing several dis-analogies, too), Freud comes to the heart of his argument — equal parts terminological clarification and technical suggestion.

“The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him, deals with it in the same way and proceeds in this alternating fashion until the end. If, in accounts of analytic technique, so little is said about ‘constructions,’ that is because ‘interpretations' and their effects are spoken of instead. But I think that ‘construction’ is by far the more appropriate description. ‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has forgotten, in some such way as this: ‘Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you,’ . . . and so on” (260-61)

In fact, the quoted passage appears to distinguish between “interpretations” and “constructions” in several ways, both explicitly and implicitly.

Most explicitly, interpretations purportedly apply to “single elements” of the patient’s productions, and Freud cites as examples associations and parapraxes. If a patient shows up late to analysis, the analyst may “interpret” that particular act as a hostile gesture. By contrast, it seems, “constructions” are not restricted to single elements, but rather entail the organization of multiple elements into a “constellation” of some kind.
More implicitly, though equally important, an interpretation need not, on the evidence, directly evoke the forgotten history we would like ultimately to recover — even if it points the way to it. Again, the analyst may interpret a patient’s late arrival as unconsciously hostile without thinking or saying anything about its genesis in a history unknown to both analyst and patient. By contrast, once more, a “construction” does represent the patient’s repressed “prehistory” — presumably on the basis of some number of (now agglomerated) “interpretations.”

It is here that Freud addresses the well-known “falsifiability” charge against analytic procedure, and in doing so throws valuable light on the epistemic standing of psychoanalysis more generally. For how do we know when our conjectures have hit their mark? I will take up this question in the next post.

Mike Becker 2/5/23 Mike Becker 2/5/23

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

a loss (which might ordinarily give rise to mourning)
of a narcissistic object-choice
by an ego consequently disposed to identificatory, “regressive drawing-in of libido” (251)
whose attachment to that object was marked by “conflict due to ambivalence” (251)
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.

Mike Becker 1/29/23 Mike Becker 1/29/23

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).

Mike Becker 1/22/23 Mike Becker 1/22/23

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:

I will take up some implications of this passage in the next entry.

Mike Becker 1/15/23 Mike Becker 1/15/23

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.