You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud opens his essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” with the stated objective of elucidating the psychological phenomenon of melancholia. However, preparing thus an internal, thematic disquisition on a designatable entity, the introductory phrase doubly displaces the reader's focus in simultaneously constituting a methodological assertion.
Dreams having served us as the prototype in normal life of narcissistic mental disorders, we shall now try to throw some light on the nature of melancholia by comparing it with the normal affect of mourning.1
The primary phenomenon under investigation, melancholia, thus leans as object of study on the phenomenon of mourning, this anaclitic relation explaining the dual reference of the essay's title. No sooner do we direct our attention to melancholia, expecting “some light to be thrown on it,” than we discover it to slip to the side, accessible only by indirect means, by “comparison.” At the same time, the reader is projected out of the thematics of the essay to a meta-perspective by which the investigatory process is itself foregrounded, seeming to render the substantive enigma of the essay, the nature of melancholia, in this way secondary to a still more fundamental problematic regarding the very process by which enhanced understanding itself may be achieved. From this angle, the essay posits first and foremost a question of hermeneutics.
This question, posed at the double sacrifice of unified presence, that is, by means of an instantaneous displacement of melancholia into a relative frame which is itself couched in a metalanguage, reveals loss to be intrinsic to the Freudian formulation of the question of meaning. This loss is specific to Freud's historical moment in that it testifies to a breach with the empirical science of the day; stretched to its limits by Freud himself, the contemporary model apparently shows