The Psychotherapy of the Dead: Loss and Character Structure in Freud's Metapsychology

In 1923, in a slim volume titled The Ego and the Id, Freud articulated an idea of profound psychological value, an idea conversant with the ghostly presences which haunt our psychic life.

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego …; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices.1

At first glance these sentences seem to contain little that Freud had not said earlier.2 Indeed, the passage clearly alludes to the same psychopathological processes which he reported on in his 1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia.” There, too, the psyche's use of the mechanisms of introjection and identification when dealing with lost objects was discussed. The importance of Freud's restatement in 1923 of an idea dating back to 1917 is that while the analysis of melancholia