Chapter 11 The Wound, the Bow and the Shadow of the Object: Notes on Freud's ‘Mourning and Melancholia’1

Consider these quotes from ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917):

Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object.

And

The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it.

And consider these (the second quote is from ‘The Ego and the Id’):

If the love for the object — a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up — takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering.… It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting — and so dangerous. So immense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognize as the primal state from which

Page 161

instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruction.… The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object — if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world.

(This has the emotional atmosphere of my second quote above: cannibalistic devouring, ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, as it were, goes with the sadistic abusing and killing of the object.)

And

The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved. To the ego, therefore, living means the sa