The Morality of Loss—The Social Construction of Mourning and Melancholia

AS FREUD DESCRIBED IT, MELANCHOLIA is a condition akin to mourning with the main difference between the two being that "In mourning it is the world that has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself" (1964, p. 51). In a condition of melancholia, an individual's response to the loss of a valued object is inextricably, and seemingly inexplicably, bound up with severe self-criticism and the loss of self-regard. As Freud acknowledges, the mental state of the mourner, isolated in dejection and preoccupied with sadness, is no less "disturbed" than that of the melancholic, but in the case of the mourner, "It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological" (p. 49).

The purpose of this paper is to suggest the possibility that in some instances what we might be inclined to think of as melancholia or pathological grief may be a mourner's response to loss that relevant onlookers do not know so well how to explain. In other words, though Freud did not say so directly, he strongly implies that in cases of mourning or "normal" grief, there is a consonance between how the mourner understands his or her loss and how that loss is understood—and responded to—by others. It may be further argued that it is that very consonance that is a necessary (though, of course, not necessarily sufficient) precondition for the development of normal, as distinct from pathological, grief.

The experiences of loss and mourning are not only individual and intrapsychic experiences; they are also embedded in a social