Introduction Mourning and Melancholia

1.     The Freudian method. At a time when so-called “classical” psychiatry was failing, Freud’s On Mourning and Melancholia stands out as an example of a genuine methodology that continues to enable clinicians to conjoin psychiatry and psychoanalysis. 


This method pierces through Freud’s very title Mourning and Melancholia. Indeed, by selecting the word “mourning”, he distances himself from medical vocabulary and selects instead a word that structures the unconscious - and by “unconscious”, I mean both the intimate, personal unconscious as well as the “people’s” since time immemorial. With the use of “melancholia”, Freud’s text will refer explicitly and strictly to the tradition of alienism,  foregoing entirely the its use among the classics, in medieval poetry or even German romanticism. Centuries after Chrétien de Troyes’ uncanny linkage of the terms in Perceval, Freud conjoins the two heterogenous signifiers. Even more remarkable, the fact that he immediately specifies that although he has no idea what mourning and melancholia actually are, he intuits a relationship among them. Beyond the terms’ clinical kinship, reading Freud’s text enables us to grasp a major distinction: for humans, mourning is a form of knowledge (“savoir”) while melancholia fails to make anything known to the subject. Moreover, melancholia is a position of forced understanding (“connaissance forcée”) of the Real. Nowadays, it’s no easy task to measure the epistemological rupture Freud introduced with his attempt to conjoin psychoanalysis and classical psychiatry. To him, a morbid entity is not only a clinical category distinct from another. Beyond casuistry and nosography, Freud seeks to understand an unconscious position that is, more often than not, a position of defence against what he calls “reality”, and which Lacan will prefer to name the Real. Without getting too sidetracked, it’s worth noting here that the very idea of a “position” appears also in Melanie Klein’s work when she so eloquently discusses the “depressive position” that follows a child’s “schizoparanoid position” (in the best-case scenarios). Here too, following Freud, we may witness this marvellous and rare occurence: the embedding of psychiatric terms with the work of the unconscious.
2.     New translations always spur new questions. Our colleague Jean-Pierre Rossfelder successfully translated Freud’s style, a style both easy yet rigorous summarised by Rossfelder as Freud’s “precise yet unpretentious vocabulary”. Inspired by the melting pot that is the Sainte-Anne School of Psychoanalysis in Paris, Rossfelder’s translation spurs some fundamental questions about melancholia and help us understand the ailment that perplexed Freud and continues to befuddle us today. A good example follows. In the French translation of Freud’s “Complete works” directed by Laplanche, we read: « Within melancholia we find thus woven a multitude of struggles for the object, one after the other, in which hate and love struggle also, the first in the hope of detaching the libido from the object, the second in order to reaffirm the libido’s position against the assault itself.” The same passage translated by Rossfelder reads as: “A multitude of isolated fights for the object weave themselves within melancholia, among which hate and love are fighting each other, some in order to separate the libido from the object, others to maintain this libidinal position in the face of the assault. “ The difference between these two translations may appear slim at first. Careful reading is required. Rossfelder’s new translation brings to light the idea that within each isolated struggle there is a generic, overarching struggle between hate and love. With this in mind, it becomes clear that Freud’s conception of the sickly state we name “melancholia” is actually rather complex and actually suggests that we’re dealing with aspects that remain unexplained, i.e the way in which the melancholic bout ceases one day only to reappear later or to invert itself into a manic or even paranoid state. This seemingly minimal divergence - which might leave Germanists slightly disoriented - suggests that we shouldn’t just think of melancholia and mania as macroscopic states but also as a molecular struggle taking place within such patients.  I remember a particularly endearing patient, a professional philosopher who had studied under Bachelard. She was hospitalised in our unit because of manic episodes during which she commands/orders dozens of Dalmatians (perhaps a distant childhood memory of Disney’s film?) These episodes would stop after a few weeks, and she was able to resume her interest in Greek philosophy and could find support in the most complex of metaphors. Nonetheless, a period of deep depression would follow, caused by the feeling that hers was not a legitimate position for transmitting such noble and complex knowledge. We then had to wait
until her use of philosophical terms could retrieve some colors, a sense of light and poetry perhaps, which eventually helped her mood stabilise and her life, therefore, could resume. It might thus be conceivable to superimpose the melancholia-mania oscillation onto the known disjunction of metaphor-metonymy. The gel of metaphor hits its apex in melancholia; the flight of assonance in mania was indeed highlighted in Binswanger’s famous text On the Flight of Ideas. The point of each session would therefore not only be to contain psychosis through writing, as we often say, but to “poeticise” meaning, to enable a metaphor to make light again of metonymy’s sensoriality. Could this then be a new prerequisite for the possible treatment of manic depression? It is indeed noticeable that manic depressive patients are especially receptive to the psychoanalytic cure, and that this aptitude ultimately influences their journey as a whole. Such was the case with this captivating philosopher patient.
3.   The heart of Freud’s text: the relationship between identification and object relation. It is perhaps in the final part of his text that Freud mentions the question of narcissistic identification, when he refers to the cure of a schizophrenic patient as a rather curious example. Suddenly, Freud has the following profound intuition (which he’ll use again in 1921 in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego): when the object is lost, the subject’s investment into the object is replaced by a partial, extremely limited identification using a single trait from the object person. We know the importance that Lacan afforded this « einziger Zug », a unique or unitary trait. In the face of loss, in the face of the void caused by loss, we answer individually or collectively with a form of identification. We all remember the way the expression Je suis Charlie became the rallying trait of a certain type of determination.  Here we touch upon the text’s specifically psychoanalytic part, where Freud imports his own signifiers into the field of psychopathology. In mourning as in other moments in life, the two great themes of fantasy and identification conjoin and morph.
In any cure, in any session of any cure, we work either on one edge or the other - on fantasy or identification. And just when we think we’re working on one, we realise we’re actually on the other. This is, I believe, Freud’s henceforth unsurpassed node-point, what Lacan ends up discussing in his own way in La Logique du Fantasme and Identification. 4.     The object question in psychoanalysis The term “object” repeatedly infiltrates Freud’s text. Although we use the word “object” all the time in psychoanalysis, we don’t exactly know what the term designates. This explains why Lacan attempted to define what he understood “object” to mean. Despite evidence to the contrary, I would say that Freud only means a certain category of mourning in his text, specifically the mourning of love lost. Hence the common notion that one love lost must be replaced by another. Nowadays it would be useful to specify the various qualities of a child’s mourning, children for whom we know that the “work of mourning” doesn’t ever really end. Several degrees separate mourning from melancholia. Psychopathology has come to know and recognise these variations. We often talk about depression with melancholic intensity or melancholy-like states, not to mention pathological types of mourning. Regarding melancholia, Freud’s remarks help us understand why Marcel Czermak was able to say that in melancholia, Lacan’s “object a” would “speak openly”, unhindered and out loud. Thus Freud writes: “The patient paints his ego as abject, as incapable of any achievement and morally reprehensible. His speech is loaded with self-reproach, self-blame; he expects only exclusion and punishment.” It is common to teach psychology students that Lacan pulled his famous “objet cause du désir” from the objects described by the founders of psychoanalysis after Freud: Melanie Klein’s good and bad objects or Winnicott’s transitional object in particular. I share Czermak’s point of view of the Lacanian object as owing a lot more to the strange objects found in psychosis, like the place of the gaze in Fregoli’s famous portrayals of delusions and doppelgängers or of the voice in the unbelievable descriptions of mental automatism. In melancholia as well as Cotard’s syndrome (melancholia’s extreme expression), an object extracts itself, is heard screaming its own inhumanity to the world, its perpetual presence as waste/detritus. Our common subjectivity is more readily legible when considered from these most radical edges- which is why Lacan could say that there would be no transmission of psychoanalysis if it pulled away from institutions of insanity (“lieux de folie”).
5.    Freud’s strange omission: affective anaesthesia. Freud was of course familiar with the German alienists, especially Griesinger’s “moral pain” (“Schmertz”) as melancholia’s essential psychic disturbance. He writes: “Such patients can rejoice about nothing, not even the happiest of events. Any event that concerns them becomes a new source of pain.”  In the psychiatric tradition, this pain - caused by the inability to feel anything - is called “affective anaesthesia”. It’s possible that Freud didn’t know the texts of French alienists like Cotard and Séglas, who also highlighted this particular “loss of mental vision”. But since he worked constantly with friends and colleagues like Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Ludwig Binswanger or Victor Tausk, Freud couldn’t have not known this cardinal sign that is affective anaesthesia/numbness. What seems to be almost a Freudian slip is that in his famous 1895 « manuscript G », Freud discusses with a confidence still perplexing today the relationship between anaesthesia in the sexual sense, and melancholia: “How do we explain the essential role of anaesthesia in melancholia?”, he asks -  and then discusses the “obvious” relationships between melancholia and frigidity. This anaesthesia, for Freud, is “what proves:         1. A long history of frigidity among many melancholic patients.    2.The observation that everything that provokes frigidity encourages the development of melancholy.      3. The existence of a category of women who are psychically very demanding, whose desire shifts quite readily into melancholy and who are frigid.” It would be amusing to update this feminine G spot but Freud at the time is using the word “melancholy” quite extensively, and he soon gave up on this sexual explanation, one which justifiably didn’t sit well with feminism. But we wish to believe that this memory is not the only explanation of his repression of the theme of affective anaesthesia. 6.     Reading Freud in his own context As we know, Freud wrote Mourning and Melancholia while both of his sons were soldiers fighting in the war and when he had just learned of his cancer. But we should remember also that this was a time when the conditions in German speaking countries were starting to shift, thus
laying the foundations for the moral anaesthesia that infamously followed. We absolutely cannot - and Freud knew this from his own identity and training - we cannot mourn memories, mourn the past - and we have yet to come out of the a form of depressivity inferred by the dramas of the XXth century. Freud lived in this incredibly peculiar context that announced in a thousand ways the debinding/link between hate and love, between the life and death drives, concepts he later clarifies in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Culturally, we are often in a form of affective anaesthesia which comes from the foreclosure of entire sections of our collective memory. Thus, between 1904 and 1908, Kaiser Wilhelm II sends German troops into what is now Namibia (“German South West Africa”) and has General von Trotha conduct  the XXth century’s first methodical genocide (Herero and Namaqua). This pain is still barely symbolised in German history - and that is why Freud’s omission should be heard rather as an alarm: we are always on the edge of our inability to distinguish between mourning and melancholia because we are always on the edge ourselves without vision or affect for others. That is why Freud’s magnificent text remains a comet that must never die. It is a warning about the way humans are so easily capable of forgetting their own penchant for inhumanity. Our depressivity, so common today, is the trace of all these un-symbolised mournings in the unconscious. We are equally incapable of facing the Real today, and the youth are the most sensitive to social challenges coming ahead, and which we can’t yet decipher. Memory retains forgetting, Saint Augustine tells us. And so, what remains deeply moving in Freud’s short text is how it resulted from collaboration. Freud constantly questions his friends and colleagues, and when it comes to melancholia, he reiterates his indebtedness to Karl Abraham. Let us hope that we may never have to mourn such an example of clinical research in the fields of psychopathology and psychoanalysis.