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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]