By "demise" of an institution Erdheim means the painful failure to die, the failure of death. The psychological equivalent is melancholia, which is the failure of the mourning process. Institutions seldom die a quick death; they hang on and on, even after becoming anachronistic. Their structure and sometimes function and purpose are often taken over in a new edition by the institutions set up to replace them, just as Napoleon, starting out as a hero of the Revolution, eventually crowned himself emperor instead. Erdheim's historical review reveals this process of slow demise as characteristic of organized psychoanalysis.