Notes on Identification in a Case of Depression Reactive to the Death of a Love Object

In his paper, Mourning and Melancholia, published in 1917, Freud set forth a psychodynamic interpretation of melancholia on the basis of studies made in a few manic-depressive cases. There was no attempt at wide generalization or claim to universal validity. He agreed that many depressions suggesting a physiological etiology did not come under his consideration of psychogenesis. Further psychoanalytic research by him and others has confirmed and widened the application of the first tentative hypothesis. The chief features of this now familiar formulation are as follows: melancholic depression does not occur without psychopathological predisposition. This predisposition comprises libido fixation at anal levels with a resulting structure similar to that in severe obsessional states although overt manifestations may be lacking. In addition there is included a still deeper and special oral organization which is specific to the pathology of the depressive reaction and differentiates it from the lesser neuroses. The ambivalence to love objects characteristic of pregenital levels is extreme in the depressive temperament and is readily activated under new provocation which threatens loss. This special sensitiveness has an etiological connection with failure to achieve in childhood the usual libidinal separation from parents, especially the mother. The individual has never relinquished the early parental love objects and while he has made a fair-weather surface adjustment, there is preserved in his unconscious an unstable neurotic compromise in place of a real adjustment to the original disappointment and loss. The emancipation procedure failed of solution and acted instead as a trauma which left an unhealed wound ready to break out afresh at any repetition of injury.