Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia'

 One of the recurring themes of this journal is grief. A friend pointed me to Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia.”

Freud’s distinction: 

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

When someone close to me dies, the world seems less wondrous. For a while, even barbecue and chilaquiles don’t taste quite so good. The pleasures of a walk on the creek seem a little off. That’s mourning.

In melancholia, it’s not the world that’s missing something. It’s the person who is grieving.

The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished.

Freud noticed that the patients he’d seen who professed to be despicable didn’t actually show any signs of shame. He concluded he was witnessing a kind of transference. The real reprobate was actually someone else.

The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incapable, in whatever sense she may mean this.

I don’t know enough about psychology to follow his line of thought. But I understand the distinction between something that is just a part of life and something that requires medical care.

Grief is largely mysterious to me. It’s fascinating because it can and does show up in astonishing ways.

• Source: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey; London: The Hogarth Press, 1995, Vol. XIV, pp. 243-58. I found the essay here:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf