Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.” — Walter Benjamin
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What does living in troubled times do to us emotionally, socially, politically, and collectively? How do we contain the uncontainable? How do we create a space for dialogue when thinking collapses, when reality intrudes, when horror is too much to hold?
My comments in this paper will focus on these topics and on Freud’s paper “Mourning and Melancholia”. We live in a chaotic, violent world, a world that is unpredictable and “virtually insane.” At this time two wars are taking place between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Palestine. Thousands of people have died with more expected. These wars have created a collective madness-condensed in the representation of “mourning and melancholia”. I believe that mourning and melancholia are important components in our psychic life especially when we live in a time that does not make sense.
The magnitude of mourning emerged four years ago with COVID-19, an insidious virus that changed our lives. We worked from home fearing to contract the virus. Working at home at the beginning was exciting then gradually the isolation became paralyzing and at times unbearable. Our patterns of sleeping changed with recurrent nightmares and panic. Physiologically our bodies were tired, with a sense of irritation. We look melancholic like the engraving of Albrecht Dürer, called Melencolia I, 1514 which I will describe in more detail later in this paper.
In these dark times, we lost friends, patients, and family members. The dying was sudden and unpredictable. I lost my older sister in Italy before COVID-19, yet was unable to attend her funeral due to the emergence of the pandemic.
Post Covid, we started to go out and masked less often. On a conscious level, we started to move on with our life. On the unconscious level, it was difficult to ascertain what was going on. There was something that could not be named.
The political issues in the United States started to be alarmed. There was and is a fear about the future and our life. Are perhaps the fears related to internal losses floating adrift, unmetabolized melancholy?
Are we in a state of “Mourning and Melancholia”? We seem to be in unresolved mourning, with ambiguous losses that could turn into a melancholic or manic state. These states are not static or strict nosological clinical identities but are oscillations in the unconscious. The feeling of melancholia was described in Greek and Roman philosophical works. Early in history, the medical explanations had magical, cosmological underpinnings. In the psychiatric world in Germany, Switzerland, and France there was great interest in this disease. Freud (1895) also tried to explain melancholia from a neurological point of view.
The years 1914 to 1917 were important to Freud as evidenced by his prolific writing. It was during this time he wrote his seminal paper, “Mourning and Melancholia”. This paper can be understood only if placed in a historical context. Freud wrote five papers on metapsychology proposing a psychological method to understand the unconscious and its vicissitudes. It is curious and a mystery that during the same time, he destroyed seven papers about his metapsychology. The content of the five papers was an extension of his work on narcissism, psychosis and the ego ideal. The destroyed papers are, perhaps, a silencing of the theory or part of internal conflicts about losses.
A draft version of “Mourning and Melancholia” was written in 1915 and mailed to S. Ferenczi and K. Abraham for comments. The 1915 draft disappeared and emerged, like a Pompeiian vase, in 1966. The final version was published in 1917 and it was the beginning of psychoanalysis.
May (2019), a German analyst and historian, analyzed the implications of the draft to the work of Abraham, Ferenczi, and Freud. The reader is referred to this paper to explain Freud’s shift from a drive to an object relation theory. Reading May’s paper is also to enter to the core of early psychoanalytic debates. (see note 1 at the end of the paper). This Freud’s paper is crucial to understand Freud’ later work on the supergo and melancholia after he introduced the death instinct.
I read Freud’s paper in English many times and the excellent Italian translation. I found Freud’s 1917 paper dense, exciting, and enigmatic. I have chosen Richman’s summary of Freud’s work because of its lucidity.
Grief is a mental consequence of the loss of a loved object. This is usually a person but may be something inanimate such as a house or a mother country or something abstract such as an ideal. The object lost is present to consciousness and the conscious orientation to the object is never abandoned, however deep the grief, furthermore there is no ambivalence, there are no self-reproaches, but only repining. The ‘process’ or ‘mechanism’ of grief lasts a variable but restricted time during which there is a greater or lesser degree of painful dejection, loss of interest in the outer world, a temporary loss of capacity to love, and a variable amount of inhibition of life’s activities.
Melancholia has some points of resemblance to grief but what are of special interest are the differences: the loss is not necessarily a ‘real’ loss, i.e. not death or separation or loss of liberty or the like, the object loss is not present in consciousness, the ‘process’ is not necessarily temporary, there is a high degree of ambivalence, and, most important of all, in melancholia but not in grief there is a severe depreciation of the self-feelings’. P. 278.
My view is that Freud’s paper is packed with many ideas. He goes back and forth. At the start, he apologizes-for his mistakes and feels there is not enough clinical material to sustain his thesis. At the same time, he proposed many stellar ideas.
For Freud, the state of mourning could be overcome. It was a slow process that cannot be stopped. In this process, the libidinal forces are transformed by recalling many memories of the lost objects thus forming more representations.
At the end of the work of mourning, the patient can form other relationships and move on with his life.
The second part on melancholia is a “tour the force.” Freud’s metapsychological explanations are brilliant. He contrasts mourning and melancholia noticing that in melancholia the subject flagellates himself and attacks the person that has left him. The melancholic loses his vitality and gives up the world. Freud moves in many directions trying to explain the role of melancholia and mania. Mania is a state of mind that keeps control over melancholia, perhaps it is a fragile false self to control the world.
Freud’s paper is a classic Thomas Ogden’s discussion of “Mourning and Melancholia”, similar to May, suggests a movement from drive to object relations theory. (see note 2)
The reading of Freud’s paper I think influenced Ogden’s later work on object relation theory.
Reading Freud’s paper I was surprised that he never mentioned the work of the German artist Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Dürer, was a rather melancholic man.
According to Noble, B (2004) stated:
“Albrecht Dürer is the rare artist who truly deserves to be called a genius. Genius, however, is tricky business. Dürer’s intellect, introspection, and unrelenting perfectionism may have driven him to a state of melancholia- what is now known as depression. Dürer’s famed Melencolia I engraving of 1514 has been called the artist’s psychological self-portrait and indeed the image does convey the terrible struggle of high expectations and debilitating inertia, when excessive introspection paralyzes the imagination”. (page. 1)
Was Freud in writing Morning and Melancholia elaborating his theoretical clinical model or was he writing about his losses? Tormod Knutsen (2020) suggests a new reading of Freud’s paper. He writes:
“Freud lived in Vienna, and the Habsburg Empire was engaged in a full- blown war with Russia, Britain and France….Two of Freud’s sons and a son-in-law fought in the war. At first, Freud was proud of his sons who wanted to fight for the emperor, but he soon came to another understanding as the horrors of modern warfare dawned on him. He was deeply distressed by the ‘tens of thousands of dead’ and also by how rational, modern man could descend into primitive bestiality and the urge to destroy, putting the entire European civilization and culture at risk “Mourning and Melancholia” is therefore a personal work. Freud was already well acquainted with mournful and depressive thoughts. In the 1880s he treated himself with cocaine for conditions of a psychosomatic and depressive nature. “The Interpretation of Dreams”- the book that established psychoanalysis as a separate discipline – was written as a creative response to the grief over his father, who died in 1895. Many of the dreams he discusses and analyzes here stem from his most intensive periods of mourning.
In 1923-24, Freud suffered another bout of depression. It started when his daughter Sophie Freud Halberstadt (1893-1920) died from the Spanish flu. Freud subsequently developed maxillary cancer in 1923 and underwent surgery. In the summer of 1923, his grandson Heinerle (Sophie’s son) died of tuberculosis at the age of four years and six months. Freud was greatly attached to his grandson and mourned over him for a long time”, p 5.
I have quoted this long paragraph to show Freud’s mourning. The loss of Sophie was devastating. In “Martha Freud: A Biography” by Katia Behling (2005) the author stated that before Martha died she called out “Sophie-Sophie,” both the name of a maid and her daughter Sophie, who died in 1920. An hallucinatory way to stay close to Sophie. Thus could say that mourning could not be resolved completely. There are always remnants, losses that can be activated or resolved. In his later work Freud did not write much about mourning but he continue to write on melancholia in relation to the superego, aggression supported by his conceptual idea of the death drive.
The theme of mourning remerged in the work of Anna Freud. During the last years of her life, she deeply mourned the loss of her father, mother as well the four aunts who died in concentration camps. Her mourning was also a “historical morning note” that captured the horrors of the war. Her paper, “About Losing and Being Lost.” published in 1967 is in a way a continuation of Freud’s paper and object relations theory.
Can we apply the ideas of Freud on mourning to our complex contemporary world? Is the process of mourning still relevant today? Yes.
This particular time is more relevant because it must take into consideration political, sociological, and critical thinking.
This new view of mourning is expressed by Lynne Zeavin, Mary Margaret McClure, Forrest Hamer, and M. Fakhry Davids ‘in their paper” Mourning in America” , they stated the following:
“As a pandemic has deepened and the pervasive mood of uncertainty in the country has taken hold, we turned to a reconsideration of the problem of mourning and its vicissitudes, to what allows mourning to take place and what can impede it, both psychically and in society. A panel was held virtually in September 2021, in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. It was meant in part to be a revisiting of Freud’s 1917 foundational text, “Mourning and Melancholia” where they state We aimed to situate that text within the historical and social time we now inhabit as citizens and psychoanalysts. Mourning is crucial to psychic development and yet within psychoanalytic training the study of mourning often gets short shrift. Mourning is an intricate psychic process: If too threatened by the pain of loss and sorrow or the guilt to which it gives rise, it can give way to melancholia on the one hand or manic solutions on the other. If navigated and tolerated, it can lead to reparation and psychic growth.” From Zeavin (2022), p 1.
How can we endure in a world that is collapsing? How it is possible to mourn when bombs are exploding, buildings are destroyed, when basic needs like food and hospital are not available? How can a person mourn when there is no space to mourn? How to mourn when reality intrudes, when horror is too much to hold. In this extreme cases both the mind and the body collapse in a state of mourning that can turn into-melancholia.”
I think that the engraving of Melancolia 1, cited earlier, was not only the artist’s melancholia but the collapse of the world around him. It is the collapsing world that induces despair and chaos today.
So how do we create a space for dialogue when thinking collapses, when reality intrudes, when horror is too much to hold? The aim of psychoanalysis is to create-a thinking space (Denkraum] and place for imagination.
This thinking space is needed to form a collective “talking cure” in order to not become melancholic. We have to expand our field drawing on sociology, group process, politics and other disciplines to speak loudly and with clarity, We need each other to engage in this collective exercise in order to be alive.
Note (1) May, U. (2019) In conversation: Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915-1918. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100:77-98
Summary of the paper
This article concentrates on Freud’s draft of “Mourning and Melancholia,” written in 1915 and published in 1996. After presenting a summary of the main theses of Freud’s draft, Abraham’s and Ferenczi’s reactions to the text are discussed as well as Freud’s response to their comments. In addition to reviewing Freud’s partial adoption of Ferenczi’s introjection and his reluctance towards Abraham’s “mouth eroticism and sadism,” the article considers the question of whether and to what extent his disciples’ interjections–particularly Abraham’s approach–made their way into the final version of “Mourning and Melancholia.” The article closes by integrating the notion of narcissistic identification, which forms the core of Freud’s understanding of depression, and his study of the “preliminary stages of love,” written the same year, into a conceptualization of the narcissistic relationship between subject and object. Special attention is paid to the clinical relevance of the difference between narcissistic and libidinal object cathexis, which Freud had introduced., p1
Note (2) Ogden, T. H. (1983) The Concept of Internal Object Relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 64:227-241
Partial summary
The development of the concept of internal object relations is traced through the work of Freud, Abraham, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Bion. I have proposed that the establishment of an internal object relationship requires a dual splitting of the ego into a pair of dynamically unconscious suborganizations of personality, one identified with the self and the other with the object in the original early object relationship. These aspects of ego stand in a particular relationship to one another, the nature of which is determined by the infant’s subjective experience of the early relationship. Since both the self- and the object component of the internal object relationship are aspects of the ego, each can generate experience (e.g. to think, feel, and perceive) semi-autonomously and yet in relation to one another. p1.
I would like to thank the many colleagues who helped with the editorial work.
References:
Behling, K. (2005) Martha Freud a Biography. Polity Press. Cambridge, UK
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914- 1916: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258.
May, U. (2019) In conversation: Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915-1918). International Journal of Psychoanalysi.N, 100:77-98.
Noble, B. (2004) Dürer, Melencolia, Kahn Academy” In Google search”
Ogden, T. (2002) “A New Reading of the Origins of Object Relations Theory.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83: 767-782.
Rickman J. (1924 -1957) Selected Contributions to Psycho-Analysis Basic Book New York. The summary of Rickman on Mourning and Melancholia is from “A survey: The Development of Psychoanalytic Theory of the Psychosis” 1094-1927.
Tormod K. (2020) The dynamics of grief and melancholia
Tidsskr Nor Legeforen Vol. 140. P.1
Zeavin, L., McClure, M. M., Hamer, F. & Davids, M. F. (2022) “Mourning in America”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 70:939-968
