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Some writers write what they think; others think what they write. The latter seem to do their thinking in the very act of writing, as if thoughts arise from the conjunction of pen and paper, the work unfolding by surprise as it goes. Freud in many of his most important books and articles, including “Mourning and melancholia” (1917a), was a writer of this latter sort. In these writings, Freud made no attempt to cover his tracks, for example, his false starts, his uncertainties, his reversals of thinking (often done mid-sentence), his shelving of compelling ideas for the time being because they seemed to him too speculative or lacking adequate clinical foundation.
The legacy that Freud left was not simply a set of ideas, but, as important, and inseparable from those ideas, a new way of thinking about human experience that gave rise to nothing less than a new form of human subjectivity. Each of his psychoanalytic writings, from this point of view, is simultaneously an explication of a set of concepts and a demonstration of a newly created way of thinking about and experiencing ourselves.
I have chosen to look closely at Freud’s “Mourning and melancholia” for two reasons. First, I consider this paper to be one of Freud’s most important contributions in that it develops for the first time, in a systematic way, a line of thought which later would be termed “object relations theory” (Fairbairn, 1952). I use the term object relations theory to refer to a group of psychoanalytic theories holding in common a loosely knit set of metaphors that address the intrapsychic and interpersonal effects of relationships among unconscious “internal” objects, that is, among unconscious split-off parts of
the personality. This line of thought has played a major role in shaping psychoanalysis from 1917 onward. Second, I have found that attending closely to Freud’s writing as writing in “Mourning and melancholia” provides an extraordinary opportunity not only to listen to Freud think, but al