Mourning and Melancholia, the Father of Psychoanalysis

¶ … Mourning and Melancholia," the "father of psychoanalysis" meditated on how the human psyche deals with loss. While melancholia and mourning share many of the same surface traits, the two are very different.

Mourning," he wrote, "is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person." Freud believed that the normal way to deal with grief is to mourn and after a period of time, the loss will be overcome. If anything interferes with mourning, the result can be damaging.

Melancholia, on the other hand, is identified by Freud as a pathological illness, which results from an inability to recover from a loss and return to normalcy. Therefore, "the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound," a wound that will not heal.

Douglas Crimp, an art critic, used Freud's essay in promoting AIDS activism. In 1989, Crimp wrote and essay of his own, titled "Mourning and Militancy" which implied that gay men are denied many of the necessary aspects of Freud's mourning process because they are victims of the shadow of AIDS and homophobia.

Crimp believes that the "violence of silence and omission" of prejudice against homosexuals causes a chronic melancholy. Freud believed that the mourning process involves disconnecting from emotional attachment to the deceased and a sort of taking into ourselves and becoming the thing we miss in the other. Crimp confirms this belief; saying that the gay community shows that melancholia does indeed take place when normal mourning is interrupted.

Freud distinguishes between the mourning of loss and the entrance into the withdrawn depression that characterizes melancholia. In this decisive essay, Freud wrote:

As we have seen, however, melancholia contains something more than normal mourning. In melancholia, the relation to the object is no simple one; it is complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is either constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those experiences that involved the threat of losing the object. For this reason, the 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. In melancholia, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other."

Freud said that melancholia is similar to mourning in that it is a reaction to the loss of someone. However, he believed that the two were very different in viewpoints. "In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself."

This means that a person who is mourning experiences grief over the loss of someone or something beloved. Melancholia is grief over the loss of the ego. Melancholia produces a wound that is unable to close, whereas mourning helps heal the wound. With the process of mourning, the participant goes through a death process for the living in which the participant travels the cycle of adjustment when a loved one is lost.

In the death process, the dead may or may not find permanent rebirth, but one loses self-awareness and so achieves a temporary rebirth at least. In the mourning process, one must find rebirth. If they are unsuccessful, says Freud, they enter a cycle of melancholia instead.

Freud believes that, from early childhood, most people have a need to be artistic. He also says that a sense of loss enables an artist to see things differently. The artistic vision rules his life. The artistic is neither completely normal nor neurotic, but rather endowed with a creative personality and passion that allows him to distinguish his grief feelings of melancholia from his grief feelings of mourning.

The artist longs for normalcy and is constantly fought by his need for art and his vision. His melancholic feelings are offset by his artwork. Grief is therefore interpreted as mourning, not depression. Mourning is considered a positive process in life, as it leads the sufferer to change and growth, to a kind of rebirth, to a condition previously unknown by the participant.

I agree with Freud that the process of melancholia is similar to the process of mourning. Both come from the loss of something, whether it is a person or a thing. It is particularly fascinating to view Crimp's essay, which relates the situation to a modern issue that is surrounded by grief.

As Freud states, "The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning... An extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale." This diminution in self-regard, according to Freud, gives rise to the unique personality of melancholy. If someone dies of AIDS, a survivor would be more likely to suffer from melancholia than someone who lost a loved one under normal circumstances.

Freud, in describing aspects of the melancholic person's behavior, wrote: that meloncholics "are far from evincing towards those around them the attitude of humility and submissiveness that would alone befit such worthless people. On the contrary, they make the greatest nuisance of themselves, and always seem as though they felt slighted and had been treated with great injustice."

Victims of prejudice, perhaps as the result of homophobia, or those living in the shadow of AIDS may see themselves as worthless, especially after losing a loved one to AIDS. Rather than mourning their loss, they may exhibit the type of behavior described above.

In John Archer's "The Nature of Grief," he notes that Freud's essay has greatly influenced the conception of grief, generating a number of widely accepted but unproven hypotheses.

The first one is the conception of grief as an active process, including the struggle to give up the emotional and internal attachment to a loved one. The second is the grief work hypothesis, which states that a loss has to be confronted in thought and expression in order to overcome the initial denial of reality. Freud believed that if this did not happen, pathological grief would occur. The third theory is that every person will show depression or distress and that recovery always comes with time. The last assumption is that of the existence of stages of grief.