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9 July 1998

    From: General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology,
    Sigmund Freud, with an introduction by the Editor, Philip Rieff,
    Collier Books, New York, 1963 (paper), pp. 164-179.

    Mourning and Melancholia1 (1917)

    Now that dreams have proved of service to us as the normal
    prototypes of narcissistic mental disorders, we propose to try
    whether a comparison with the normal emotion of grief, and
    its expression in mourning, will not throw some light on the
    nature of melancholia. This time, however, we must make a
    certain prefatory warning against too great expectations of
    the result. Even in descriptive psychiatry the definition of
    melancholia is uncertain; it takes on various clinical forms
    (some of them suggesting somatic rather than psychogenic
    affections) that do not seem definitely to warrant reduction to
    a unity. Apart from those impressions which every observer
    may gather, our material here is limited to a small number of
    cases the psychogenic nature of which was indisputable. Any
    claim to general validity for our conclusions shall be forgone
    at the outset, therefore, and we will console ourselves by
    reflecting that, with the means of investigation at our dis-
    posal to-day, we could hardly discover anything that was not
    typical, at least of a small group if not of a whole class of
    disorders.

    __________

      1 First published in Zeitschrift, Bd. IV., 1916-18; reprinted in
      Sammlung, Vierte Folge. [Translated by Joan Riviere.]

    A correlation of melancholia and mourning seems justified
    by the general picture of the two conditions.2 Moreover,
    wherever it is possible to discern the external influences in life
    which have brought each of them about, this exciting cause
    proves to be the same in both. Mourning is regularly the re-
    action to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some
    abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as father-
    land, liberty, an ideal, and so on. As an effect of the same
    influences, melancholia instead of a state of grief develops in
    some people, whom we consequently suspect of a morbid
    pathological disposition. It is also well worth notice that, al-
    though grief involves grave departures from the normal atti-
    tude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a morbid
    condition and hand the mourner over to medical treatment.
    We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome,
    and we look upon any interference with it as inadvisable or
    even harmful.
    __________

      2 Abraham, to whom we owe the most important of the few
      analytic studies on this subject, also took this comparison as his
      starting point. (Zentralblatt. Bd. II.. 1912.)

    The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a
    profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the
    outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all
    activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a
    degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revil-
    ings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punish-
    ment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we
    consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met
    with in grief. The fall in self-esteem is absent in grief; but
    otherwise the features are the same. Profound mourning, the
    reaction to the loss of a loved person, contains the same feel-
    ing of pain, loss of interest in the outside world--in so far as
    it does not recall the dead one--loss of capacity to adopt any
    new object of love, which would mean a replacing of the one
    mourned, the same turning from every active effort that is
    not connected with thoughts of the dead. It is easy to see that
    this inhibition and circumscription in the ego is the expression
    of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing
    over for other purposes or other interests. It is really only
    because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude
    does not seem to us pathological.

    We should regard it as a just comparison, too, to call the
    temper of grief "painful." The justification for this comparison
    will probably prove illuminating when we are in a position to
    define pain in terms of the economics of the mind.3

    __________

      3 [The words "painful" and "pain" in this paragraph represent
      the German Schmerz (i.e. the ordinary connotation of pain in
      English) and not Unlust, the mental antithesis of pleasure, also
      technically translated "pain."--Trans.]

    Now in what consists the work which mourning performs?
    I do not think there is anything far-fetched in the following
    representation of it. The testing of reality, having shown that
    the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all
    the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this
    object. Against this demand a struggle of course arises--it
    may be universally observed that man never willingly aban-
    dons a libido-position, not even when a substitute is already
    beckoning to him. This struggle can be so intense that a
    turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to
    through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis.4 The
    normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day.
    Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is
    now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time
    and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the
    lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of
    the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object
    is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the
    libido from it accomplished. Why this process of carrying out
    the behest of reality bit by bit, which is in the nature of a
    compromise, should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all
    easy to explain in terms of mental economics. It is worth
    noting that this pain5 seems natural to us. The fact is, how-
    ever, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego
    becomes free and uninhibited again.

    __________

      4 Cf. the preceding paper.

      5 [Cf. footnote three. The German here is Schmerz-unlust, a
      combination of the two words for pain.--Trans.]

    Now let us apply to melancholia what we have learnt about
    grief. In one class of cases it is evident that melancholia too
    may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object; where this is
    not the exciting cause one can perceive that there is a loss of
    a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died,
    but has become lost as an object of love (e.g. the case of a
    deserted bride). In yet other cases one feels justified in con-
    cluding that a loss of the kind has been experienced, but one
    cannot see clearly what has been lost, and may the more
    readily suppose that the patient too cannot consciously per-
    ceive what it is he has lost. This, indeed, might be so even
    when the patient was aware of the loss giving rise to the
    melancholia, that is, when he knows whom he has lost but not
    what it is he has lost in them. This would suggest that melan-
    cholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a
    love-object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there
    is nothing unconscious about the loss.

    In grief we found that the ego's inhibited condition and
    loss of interest was fully accounted for by the absorbing work
    of mourning. The unknown loss in melancholia would also
    result in an inner labour of the same kind and hence would
    be responsible for the melancholic inhibition. Only, the in-
    hibition of the melancholiac seems puzzling to us because we
    cannot see what it is that absorbs him so entirely. Now the
    melancholiac displays something else which is lacking in grief
    --an extraordinary fall in his self-esteem, an impoverishment
    of his ego on a grand scale. In grief the world becomes poor
    and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient
    represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort
    and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself
    and expects to be cast out and chastised. He abases himself
    before everyone and commiserates his own relatives for being
    connected with someone so unworthy. He does not realize
    that any change has taken place in him, but extends his self-
    criticism back over the past and declares that he was never
    any better. This picture of delusional belittling--which is pre-
    dominantly moral--is completed by sleeplessness and refusal
    of nourishment, and by an overthrow, psychologically very
    remarkable, of that instinct which constrains every living
    thing to cling to life.

    Both scientifically and therapeutically it would be fruitless
    to contradict the patient who brings these accusations against
    himself. He must surely be right in some way and be describ-
    ing something that corresponds to what he thinks. Some of his
    statements, indeed, we are at once obliged to confirm without
    reservation. He really is as lacking in interest, as incapable of
    love and of any achievement as he says. But that, as we know,
    is secondary, the effect of the inner travail consuming his ego,
    of which we know nothing but which we compare with the
    work of mourning. In certain other self-accusations he also
    seems to us justified, only that he has a keener eye for the
    truth than others who are not melancholic. When in his ex-
    acerbation of self-criticism he describes himself as petty,
    egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole
    aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, for
    all we know it may be that he has come very near to self-
    knowledge; we only wonder why a man must become ill
    before he can discover truth of this kind. For there can be no
    doubt that whoever holds and expresses to others such an
    opinion of himself--one that Hamlet harboured of himself
    and all men6--that man is ill, whether he speaks the truth or
    is more or less unfair to himself. Nor is it difficult to see that
    there is no correspondence, so far as we can judge, between
    the degree of self-abasement and its real justification. A good,
    capable, conscientious woman will speak no better of herself
    after she develops melancholia than one who is actually
    worthless; indeed, the first is more likely to fall ill of the dis-
    ease than the other, of whom we too should have nothing
    good to say. Finally, it must strike us that after all the melan-
    choliac's behaviour is not in every way the same as that of
    one who is normally devoured by remorse and self-reproach.
    Shame before others, which would characterize this condition
    above everything, is lacking in him, or at least there is little
    sign of it. One could almost say that the opposite trait of
    insistent talking about himself and pleasure in the consequent
    exposure of himself predominates in the melancholiac.

    __________

      6 "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whip-
      ping?" (Act II. Sc. 2).

    The essential thing, therefore, is not whether the melan-
    choliac's distressing self-abasement is justified in the opinion
    of others. The point must be rather that he is correctly de-
    scribing his psychological situation in his lamentations. He
    has lost his self-respect and must have some good reason for
    having done so. It is true that we are then faced with a con-
    tradiction which presents a very difficult problem. From the
    analogy with grief we should have to conclude that the loss
    suffered by the melancholiac is that of an object; according
    to what he says the loss is one in himself.

    Before going into this contradiction, let us dwell for a
    moment on the view melancholia affords of the constitution
    of the ego. We see how in this condition one part of the ego
    sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it
    were, looks upon it as an object. Our suspicion that the critical
    institution in the mind which is here split off from the ego
    might also demonstrate its independence in other circum-
    stances will be confirmed by all further observations. We shall
    really find justification for distinguishing this institution from
    the rest of the ego. It is the mental faculty commonly called
    conscience that we are thus recognizing; we shall count it,
    along with the censorship of consciousness and the testing of
    reality, among the great institutions of the ego and shall also
    find evidence elsewhere showing that it can become diseased
    independently. In the clinical picture of melancholia dis-
    satisfaction with the self on moral grounds is far the most
    outstanding feature; the self-criticism much less frequently
    concerns itself with bodily infirmity, ugliness, weakness, social
    inferiority; among these latter ills that the patient dreads or
    asseverates the thought of poverty alone has a favoured
    position.

    There is one observation, not at all difficult to make, which
    supplies an explanation of the contradiction mentioned above.
    If one listens patiently to the many and various self-accusa-
    tions of the melancholiac, one cannot in the end avoid the
    impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at
    all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant
    modifications they do fit someone else, some person whom the
    patient loves, has loved or ought to love. This conjecture is
    confirmed every time one examines the facts. So we get
    the key to the clinical picture--by perceiving that the self-
    reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have
    been shifted on to the patient's own ego.

    The woman who loudly pities her husband for being bound
    to such a poor creature as herself is really accusing her hus-
    band of being a poor creature in some sense or other. There
    is no need to be greatly surprised that among those transferred
    from him some genuine self-reproaches are mingled: they are
    allowed to obtrude themselves since they help to mask the
    others and make recognition of the true state of affairs im-
    possible; indeed, they derive from the "for" and "against"
    contained in the conflict that has led to the loss of the loved
    object. The behaviour of the patients too becomes now much
    more comprehensible. Their complaints are really "plaints"
    in the legal sense of the word; it is because everything deroga-
    tory that they say of themselves at bottom relates to someone
    else that they are not ashamed and do not hide their heads.
    Moreover, they are far from evincing towards those around
    them the attitude of humility and submission that alone would
    befit such worthless persons; on the contrary, they give a great
    deal of trouble, perpetually taking offence and behaving as if
    they had been treated with great injustice. All this is possible
    only because the reactions expressed in their behaviour still
    proceed from an attitude of revolt, a mental constellation
    which by a certain process has become transformed into
    melancholic contrition.

    Once this is recognized there is no difficulty in reconstruct-
    ing this process. First there existed an object-choice, the libido
    had attached itself to a certain person; then, owing to a real
    injury or disappointment concerned with the loved person,
    this object-relationship was undermined. The result was not
    the normal one of withdrawal of the libido from this object
    and transference of it to a new one, but something different
    for which various conditions seem to be necessary. The object-
    cathexis proved to have little power of resistance, and was
    abandoned; but the free libido was withdrawn into the ego
    and not directed to another object. It did not find application
    there, however, in any one of several possible ways, but served
    simply to establish an identification of the ego with the aban-
    doned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego,
    so that the latter could henceforth be criticized by a special
    mental faculty like an object, like the forsaken object. In this
    way the loss of the object became transformed into a loss in
    the ego, and the conflict between the ego and the loved person
    transformed into a cleavage between the criticizing faculty of
    the ego and the ego as altered by the identification.

    Certain things may be directly inferred with regard to the
    necessary conditions and effects of such a process. On the
    one hand, a strong fixation to the love-object must have been
    present; on the other hand, in contradiction to this, the object-
    cathexis can have had little power of resistance. As Otto Rank
    has aptly remarked, this contradiction seems to imply that the
    object-choice had been effected on a narcissistic basis, so that
    when obstacles arise in the way of the object-cathexis it can
    regress into narcissism. The narcissistic identification with the
    object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the
    result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved
    person the love-relation need not be given up. This kind of
    substitution of identification for object-love is an important
    mechanism in the narcissistic affections; Karl Landauer has
    lately been able to point to it in the process of recovery in
    schizophrenia.7 It of course represents a regression from one
    type of object-choice to the primal narcissism. We have else-
    where described how object-choice develops from a prelimi-
    nary stage of identification, the way in which the ego first
    adopts an object and the ambivalence in which this is ex-
    pressed. The ego wishes to incorporate this object into itself,
    and the method by which it would do so, in this oral or can-
    nibalistic stage, is by devouring it. Abraham is undoubtedly
    right in referring to this connection the refusal of nourishment
    met with in severe forms of melancholia.

    _________

      7 Zeitschrift, Bd. II., 1914.

    The conclusion which our theory would require, namely,
    that the disposition to succumb to melancholia--or some part
    of it--lies in the narcissistic type of object-choice, unfortu-
    nately still lacks confirmation by investigation. In the opening
    remarks of this paper I admitted that the empirical material
    upon which this study is founded does not supply all we
    could wish. On the assumption that the results of observation
    would accord with our inferences, we should not hesitate to
    include among the special characteristics of melancholia a
    regression from object-cathexis to the still narcissistic oral
    phase of the libido. Identifications with the object are by no
    means rare in the transference-neuroses too; indeed, they are
    a well-known mechanism in symptom-formation, especially in
    hysteria. The difference, however, between narcissistic and
    hysterical identification may be perceived in the object-
    cathexis, which in the first is relinquished, whereas in the
    latter it persists and exercises an influence, usually confined to
    certain isolated actions and innervations. Nevertheless, even
    in the transference-neuroses identification is the expression of
    a community which may signify love. The narcissistic identifi-
    cation is the older, and it paves the way to comprehension of
    the hysterical form, which has been less thoroughly studied.

    Some of the features of melancholia, therefore, are bor-
    rowed from grief, and the others from the process of regres-
    sion from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism. On the one
    hand, like mourning, melancholia is the reaction to a real loss
    of a loved object; but, over and above this, it is bound to a
    condition which is absent in normal grief or which, if it super-
    venes, transforms the latter into a pathological variety. The
    loss of a love-object constitutes an excellent opportunity for
    the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself felt and
    come to the fore. Consequently where there is a disposition to
    obsessional neurosis the conflict of ambivalence casts a patho-
    logical shade on the grief, forcing it to express itself in the
    form of self-reproaches, to the effect that the mourner himself
    is to blame for the loss of the loved one, i.e. desired it. These
    obsessional states of depression following upon the death of
    loved persons show us what the conflict of ambivalence by
    itself can achieve, when there is no regressive withdrawal of
    libido as well. The occasions giving rise to melancholia for the
    most part extend beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and
    include all those situations of being wounded, hurt, neglected,
    out of favour, or disappointed, which can import opposite
    feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an
    already existing ambivalence. This conflict of ambivalence,
    the origin of which lies now more in actual experience, now
    more in constitution, must not be neglected among the condi-
    tioning factors in melancholia. If the object-love, which can-
    not be given up, takes refuge in narcissistic identification,
    while the object itself is abandoned, then hate is expended
    upon this new substitute-object, railing at it, depreciating it,
    making it suffer and deriving sadistic gratification from its
    suffering. The self-torments of melancholiacs, which are with-
    out doubt pleasurable, signify, just like the corresponding
    phenomenon in the obsessional neurosis, a gratification of
    sadistic tendencies and of hate,8 both of which relate to an
    object and in this way have both been turned round upon the
    self. In both disorders the sufferers usually succeed in the end
    in taking revenge, by the circuitous path of self-punishment,
    on the original objects and in tormenting them by means of
    the illness, having developed the latter so as to avoid the
    necessity of openly expressing their hostility against the loved
    ones. After all, the person who has occasioned the injury to
    the patient's feelings, and against whom his illness is aimed, is
    usually to be found among those in his near neighbourhood.
    The melancholiac's erotic cathexis of his object thus undergoes
    a twofold fate: part of it regresses to identification, but the
    other part, under the influence of the conflict of ambivalence,
    is reduced to the stage of sadism, which is nearer to this
    conflict.

    __________

      8 For the distinction between the two, see the paper entitled
      "Instincts and their Vicissitudes," p. 93.

    It is this sadism, and only this, that solves the riddle of the
    tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting--
    and so dangerous. As the primal condition from which
    instinct-life proceeds we have come to recognize a self-love of
    the ego which is so immense, in the fear that rises up at the
    menace of death we see liberated a volume of narcissistic
    libido which is so vast, that we cannot conceive how this ego
    can connive at its own destruction. It is true we have long
    known that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which
    are not murderous impulses against others re-directed upon
    himself, but we have never been able to explain what interplay
    of forces could carry such a purpose through to execution.
    Now the analysis of melancholia shows that the ego can kill
    itself only when, the object-cathexis having been withdrawn
    upon it, it can treat itself as an object, when it is able to
    launch against itself the animosity relating to an object--that
    primordial reaction on the part of the ego to all objects in the
    outer world.9 Thus in the regression from narcissistic object-
    choice the object is indeed abolished, but in spite of all it
    proves itself stronger than the ego's self. In the two con-
    trasting situations of intense love and of suicide the ego is
    overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.

    __________

      9 Cf. "Instincts and their Vicissitudes." p. 86.

    We may expect to find the derivation of that one striking
    feature of melancholia, the manifestations of dread of poverty,
    in anal erotism, torn out of its context and altered by re-
    gression.

    Melancholia confronts us with yet other problems, the
    answer to which in part eludes us. The way in which it passes
    off after a certain time has elapsed without leaving traces of
    any gross change is a feature it shares with grief. It appeared
    that in grief this period of time is necessary for detailed carry-
    ing out of the behest imposed by the testing of reality, and
    that by accomplishing this labour the ego succeeds in freeing
    its libido from the lost object. We may imagine that the ego is
    occupied with some analogous task during the course of a
    melancholia; in neither case have we any insight into the
    economic processes going forward. The sleeplessness charac-
    teristic of melancholia evidently testifies to the inflexibility of
    the condition, the impossibility of effecting the general with-
    drawal of cathexes necessary for sleep. The complex of melan-
    cholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic
    energy from all sides (which we have called in the trans-
    ference-neuroses "anti-cathexes") and draining the ego until
    it is utterly depleted; it proves easily able to withstand the
    ego's wish to sleep. The amelioration in the condition that is
    regularly noticeable towards evening is probably due to a
    somatic factor and not explicable psychologically. These ques-
    tions link up with the further one, whether a loss in the ego
    apart from any object ( a purely narcissistic wound to the
    ego) would suffice to produce the clinical picture of melan-
    cholia and whether an impoverishment of ego-libido directly
    due to toxins would not result in certain forms of the disease.

    The most remarkable peculiarity of melancholia, and one
    most in need of explanation, is the tendency it displays to turn
    into mania accompanied by a completely opposite symptom-
    atology. Not every melancholia has this fate, as we know.
    Many cases run their course in intermittent periods, in the
    intervals of which signs of mania may be entirely absent or
    only very slight. Others show that regular alternation of
    melancholic and manic phases which has been classified as
    circular insanity. One would be tempted to exclude these cases
    from among those of psychogenic origin, if the psychoanalytic
    method had not succeeded in effecting an explanation and
    therapeutic improvement of several cases of the kind. It is not
    merely permissible, therefore, but incumbent upon us to ex-
    tend the analytic explanation of melancholia to mania.

    I cannot promise that this attempt will prove entirely satis-
    fying; it is much more in the nature of a first sounding and
    hardly goes beyond that. There are two points from which
    one may start: the first is a psychoanalytic point of view, and
    the second one may probably call a matter of general observa-
    tion in mental economics. The psychoanalytic point is one
    which several analytic investigators have already formulated
    in so many words, namely, that the content of mania is no
    different from that of melancholia, that both the disorders are
    wrestling with the same "complex," and that in melancholia
    the ego has succumbed to it, whereas in mania it has mastered
    the complex or thrust it aside. The other point of view is
    founded on the observation that all states such as joy, tri-
    umph, exultation, which form the normal counterparts of
    mania, are economically conditioned in the same way. First,
    there is always a long-sustained condition of great mental ex-
    penditure, or one established by long force of habit, upon
    which at last some influence supervenes making it superfluous,
    so that a volume of energy becomes available for manifold
    possible applications and ways of discharge,--for instance,
    when some poor devil, by winning a large sum of money, is
    suddenly relieved from perpetual anxiety about his daily
    bread, when any long and arduous struggle is finally crowned
    with success, when a man finds himself in a position to throw
    off at one blow some heavy burden, some false position he has
    long endured, and so on. All such situations are characterized
    by high spirits, by the signs of discharge of joyful emotion,
    and by increased readiness to all kinds of action, just like
    mania, and in complete contrast to the dejection and inhibi-
    tion of melancholia. One may venture to assert that mania is
    nothing other than a triumph of this sort, only that here again
    what the ego has surmounted and is triumphing over remains
    hidden from it. Alcoholic intoxication, which belongs to the
    same group of conditions, may be explained in the same way
    --in so far as it consists in a state of elation; here there is
    probably a relaxation produced by toxins of the expenditure
    of energy in repression. The popular view readily takes for
    granted that a person in a maniacal state finds such delight in
    movement and action because he is so "cheery." This piece
    of false logic must of course be exploded. What has happened
    is that the economic condition described above has been ful-
    filled, and this is the reason why the maniac is in such high
    spirits on the one hand and is so uninhibited in action on the
    other.

    If we put together the two suggestions reached, we have the
    following result. When mania supervenes, the ego must have
    surmounted the loss of the object (or the mourning over the
    loss, or perhaps the object itself ), whereupon the whole
    amount of anti-cathexis which the painful suffering of melan-
    cholia drew from the ego and "bound" has become available.
    Besides this, the maniac plainly shows us that he has become
    free from the object by whom his suffering was caused, for he
    runs after new object-cathexes like a starving man after bread.

    This explanation certainly sounds plausible, but in the first
    place it is too indefinite, and, secondly, it gives rise to more
    new problems and doubts than we can answer. We will not
    evade a discussion of them, even though we cannot expect it
    to lead us to clear understanding.

    First, then: in normal grief too the loss of the object is
    undoubtedly surmounted, and this process too absorbs all the
    energies of the ego while it lasts. Why then does it not set up
    the economic condition for a phase of triumph after it has
    run its course or at least produce some slight indication of
    such a state? I find it impossible to answer this objection
    off-hand. It reminds us again that we do not even know by
    what economic measures the work of mourning is carried
    through; possibly, however, a conjecture may help us here.
    Reality passes its verdict--that the object no longer exists--
    upon each single one of the memories and hopes through
    which the libido was attached to the lost object, and the ego,
    confronted as it were with the decision whether it will share
    this fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfac-
    tions in being alive to sever its attachment to the non-existent
    object. We may imagine that, because of the slowness and the
    gradual way in which this severance is achieved, the expendi-
    ture of energy necessary for it becomes somehow dissipated
    by the time the task is carried through.10

    __________

      10 The economic point of view has up till now received little
      attention in psychoanalytic researches. I would mention as an
      exception a paper by Viktor Tausk, "Compensation as a Means of
      Discounting the Motive of Repression," International Journal of
      Psycho-Analysis, vol. v. (Zeitschrift, Bd. I., 1913.)

    It is tempting to essay a formulation of the work performed
    during melancholia on the lines of this conjecture concerning
    the work of mourning. Here we are met at the outset by an
    uncertainty. So far we have hardly considered the topographi-
    cal situation in melancholia, nor put the question in what
    systems or between what systems in the mind the work of
    melancholia goes on. How much of the mental processes
    of the disease is still occupied with the unconscious object-
    cathexes that have been given up and how much with their
    substitute, by identification, in the ego1

    Now, it is easy to say and to write that "the unconscious
    (thing-)presentation of the object has been abandoned by the
    libido." In reality, however, this presentation is made up of
    innumerable single impressions (unconscious traces of them),
    so that this withdrawal of libido is not a process that can be
    accomplished in a moment, but must certainly be, like grief,
    one in which progress is slow and gradual. Whether it begins
    simultaneously at several points or follows some sort of defi-
    nite sequence is not at all easy to decide; in analyses it often
    becomes evident that first one, then another memory is ac-
    tivated and that the laments which are perpetually the same
    and wearisome in their monotony nevertheless each time take
    their rise in some different unconscious source. If the object
    had not this great significance, strengthened by a thousand
    links, to the ego, the loss of it would be no meet cause for
    either mourning or melancholia. This character of withdraw-
    ing the libido bit by bit is therefore to be ascribed alike to
    mourning and to melancholia; it is probably sustained by the
    same economic arrangements and serves the same purposes
    in both.

    As we have seen, however, there is more in the content of
    melancholia than in that of normal grief. In melancholia the
    relation to the object is no simple one; it is complicated by
    the conflict of ambivalence. This latter is either constitutional,
    i.e. it is an element of every love-relation formed by this par-
    ticular ego, or else it proceeds from precisely those experi-
    iences that involved a threat of losing the object. For this
    reason the exciting causes of melancholia are of a much
    wider range than those of grief, which is for the most part
    occasioned only by a real loss of the object, by its death. In
    melancholia, that is, countless single conflicts in which love
    and hate wrestle together are fought for the object; the one
    seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to uphold
    this libido-position against assault. These single conflicts can-
    not be located in any system but the Ucs [as written], the region of
    memory-traces of things (as contrasted with word-cathexes).
    The efforts to detach the libido are made in this system also
    during mourning; but in the latter nothing hinders these proc-
    esses from proceeding in the normal way through the Pcs to
    consciousness. For the work of melancholia this way is
    blocked, owing perhaps to a number of causes or to their
    combined operation. Constitutional ambivalence belongs by
    nature to what is repressed, while traumatic experiences with
    the object may have stirred to activity something else that has
    been repressed. Thus everything to do with these conflicts of
    ambivalence remains excluded from consciousness, until the
    outcome characteristic of melancholia sets in. This, as we
    know, consists in the libidinal cathexis that is being menaced
    at last abandoning the object, only, however, to resume its
    occupation of that place in the ego whence it came. So by
    taking flight into the ego love escapes annihilation. After this
    regression of the libido the process can become conscious; it
    appears in consciousness as a conflict between one part of the
    ego and its self-criticizing faculty.

    That which consciousness is aware of in the work of melan-
    cholia is thus not the essential part of it, nor is it even the part
    which we may credit with an influence in bringing the suffer-
    ing to an end. We see that the ego debases itself and rages
    against itself, and as little as the patient do we understand
    what this can lead to and how it can change. We can more
    readily credit such an achievement to the unconscious part of
    the work, because it is not difficult to perceive an essential
    analogy between the work performed in melancholia and in
    mourning. Just as the work of grief, by declaring the object
    to be dead and offering the ego the benefit of continuing to
    live, impels the ego to give up the object, so each single con-
    flict of ambivalence, by disparaging the object, denigrating it,
    even as it were by slaying it, loosens the fixation of the libido
    to it. It is possible, therefore, for the process in the Ucs to
    come to an end, whether it be that the fury has spent itself or
    that the object is abandoned as no longer of value. We cannot
    tell which of these two possibilities is the regular or more
    usual one in bringing melancholia to an end, nor what influ-
    ence this termination has on the future condition of the case.
    The ego may enjoy here the satisfaction of acknowledging
    itself as the better of the two, as superior to the object.

    Even if we accept this view of the work of melancholia, it
    still does not supply an explanation of the one point upon
    which we hoped for light. By analogy with various other
    situations we expected to discover in the ambivalence prevail-
    ing in melancholia the economic condition for the appearance
    of mania when the melancholia has run its course. But there
    is one fact to which our expectations must bow. Of the three
    conditioning factors in melancholia--loss of the object, am-
    bivalence, and regression of libido into the ego--the first two
    are found also in the obsessional reproaches arising after the
    death of loved persons. In these it is indubitably the ambiva-
    lence that motivates the conflict, and observation shows that
    after it has run its course nothing in the nature of a triumph
    or a manic state of mind is left. We are thus directed to the
    third factor as the only one that can have this effect. That
    accumulation of cathexis which is first of all "bound" and
    then, after termination of the work of melancholia, becomes
    free and makes mania possible must be connected with the
    regression of the libido into narcissism. The conflict in the
    ego, which in melancholia is substituted for the struggle surg-
    ing round the object, must act like a painful wound which
    calls out unusually strong anti-cathexes. Here again, however,
    it will be well to call a halt and postpone further investigations
    into mania until we have gained some insight into the eco-
    nomic conditions, first, of bodily pain, and then of the mental
    pain11 which is its analogue. For we know already that, owing
    to the interdependence of the complicated problems of the
    mind, we are forced to break off every investigation at some
    point until such time as the results of another attempt else-
    where can come to its aid.12

    __________

      11 [Schmerz.]

      12 Additional Note, 1924. Cf. the continued discussion of this
      problem in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.

    [End]