From Mourning to Melancholy

Abstract

In his famous article Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud contrasted the denotations of the two title notions. They have one feature in common, he wrote, they are a reaction to the feeling of some loss. However, while mourning is induced by an actual fact — “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”¹ — in melancholia the cause remains hidden: “the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely”.² Therefore, mourning is a normal state which relates to a reality existing outside a person, whereas melancholia is a pathological state sweeping over the human ego. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself”.³ Thus the mysteriousness of melancholia lies in the fact that loss affects the very essence of man. This fact is responsible for the difficulty of detecting the cause of the illness and it also explains why “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”.⁴