Mourning And Melancholia Quotes

I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?

Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression.

Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an “object” is usually a person, but can also be a goal or an ideal.) In Freud’s formulation, in every loving relationship there is ambivalence, mixed feelings—elements of hatred as well as love. In the case of a small, reactive depression—mourning—you are able to deal with those mixed feelings in a healthy manner: you lose, you grieve, and then you recover. In the case of a major melancholic depression, you have become obsessed with the ambivalence—the simultaneity, the irreconcilable nature of the intense love alongside the intense hatred. Melancholia—a major depression—Freud theorized, is the internal conflict generated by this ambivalence. This can begin to explain the intensity of grief experienced in a major depression. If you are obsessed with the intensely mixed feelings, you grieve doubly after a loss—for your loss of the loved individual and for the loss of any chance now to ever resolve the difficulties. “If only I had said the things I needed to, if only we could have worked things out”—for all of time, you have lost the chance to purge yourself of the ambivalence. For the rest of your life, you will be reaching for the door to let you into a place of pure, unsullied love, and you can never reach that door. It also explains the intensity of the guilt often experienced in major depression. If you truly harbored intense anger toward the person along with love, in the aftermath of your loss there must be some facet of you that is celebrating, alongside the grieving. “He’s gone; that’s terrible but…thank god, I can finally live, I can finally grow up, no more of this or that.” Inevitably, a metaphorical instant later, there must come a paralyzing belief that you have become a horrible monster to feel any sense of relief or pleasure at a time like this. Incapacitating guilt. This theory also explains the tendency of major depressives in such circumstances to, oddly, begin to take on some of the traits of the lost loved/hated one—and not just any traits, but invariably the ones that the survivor found most irritating. Psychodynamically, this is wonderfully logical. By taking on a trait, you are being loyal to your lost, beloved opponent. By picking an irritating trait, you are still trying to convince the world you were right to be irritated—you see how you hate it when I do it; can you imagine what it was like to have to put up with that for years? And by picking a trait that, most of all, you find irritating, you are not only still trying to score points in your argument with the departed, but you are punishing yourself for arguing as well. Out of the Freudian school of thought has come one of the more apt descriptions of depression—“aggression turned inward.” Suddenly the loss of pleasure, the psychomotor retardation, the impulse to suicide all make sense. As do the elevated glucocorticoid levels. This does not describe someone too lethargic to function; it is more like the actual state of a patient in depression, exhausted from the most draining emotional conflict of his or her life—one going on entirely within. If that doesn’t count as psychologically stressful, I don’t know what does.

We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence.

,,The danger that arises to someone when a love object is “lost”—through death, or betrayal, or disappointment—is not primarily the loss of that particular person or institution or ideal; the danger is to the person’s sense of himself, which depends on his sense of an ongoing internal attachment to his loved object.

Germans adored Hitler; they invested their own egos in him and, after the war, they were unable to acknowledge the inhumanity of his ideals or their horrifying consequences. They understand the defence against remembering the criminal and horrific events as a self-protective repudiation of a melancholia that would have set in absolutely inevitably if Germans had truly confronted their bond with Hitler and their burden of guilt. Through the omnipotently manifesting narcissism and National Socialist ideals, fellow humanity and the capacity for empathy with the victims were expelled from the self and destroyed.

There is a collective mourning currently endemic in Western cultures, and further afield, and this involves a loss of belief in cherished values and standards. When societies have been strongly identified with lost beliefs, this can cause a collective loss of sense of self. It seems that the catastrophes of the twentieth century may have left much of the world in the ideological equivalent of a clinical depression.

In his classic text 'Mourning and Melancholia', Freud linked depression and grief by hypothesising that in unresolved grief the image of the person lost to us becomes fused with our own 'self'. Melancholia, a severe form of depression, comes about when anger is internalised and directed inwards towards this new and changed 'self'. We can fail to grieve not only for the dead. A similar process occurs when we cannot come to terms with the loss of other things that are important to us: people, ideas, beliefs and hopes.

a reference to Freud’s 1917 paper “Mourning and Melancholia.” In the essay, Freud had proposed that melancholia arises when a patient is mourning something or someone but “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost.

The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.

In their book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, professors David L. Eng and Shinhee Han explore the topic of racial melancholia, which they describe as a mourning without end for Asian Americans, a mourning for all of the parts of ourselves that cannot name the unknowable losses we experience as children of immigrants, as adoptees, as members of diasporas. The authors explore the cost of assimilation to and mimicry of white culture as a search for belonging, and the mourning that follows when we may realize that despite our best efforts, we are still never fully accepted. The heartbreaking part of this story is that in this mimicry of whiteness, we also sacrifice much of our own identity and histories in the process. What results is a dissociation and disconnection of the self in order to survive racism and xenophobia. In many immigrant households, parents chose not to speak in their native languages at home so as to ensure that their children learned fluent English

Queer melancholia theory, an especially lush account of how the mourning process bodies forth gendered subjects, insists that subjectivity itself is a record of partings and foreclosures, cross-hatched with the compensatory forms these absences engender. Within this paradigm, queer becoming-collective-across-time and even the concept of futurity itself are predicated upon injury—separations, injuries, spatial displacements, preclusions, and other negative and negating forms of bodily experience—or traumas that precede and determine bodiliness itself, that make matter into bodies. This paradigm is indebted, via Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, not only to Derrida but also to Freud’s theory that a bodily imago and eventually the ego itself emerge from raw suffering.