Naming the Nonexistent: Melancholia as Mourning over a Possible Object*

“In my gaze I lost everything” writes the melancholic poetess Alejandra Pizarnik. “So far to seek. So near to know that it is no longer” (Pizarnik, 2005, p. 69). What is the experience of loss? What is meant by “to know that it is no longer”? What is the difference between a normal process of mourning and a state of pathological mourning, or melancholia? The experience of loss is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental experiences of mental existence. The way in which this experience takes place, with its many variations, carries within itself not only the psychic code of coping with situations of loss, but also the psychic code of coping with the course of life as such: perhaps because from the moment of birth individuals engage in a countdown of their days, perhaps because the work of self-emergence necessarily involves the diminution of the once-complete mass of material—and diminution means loss, even when it is itself the very core of existence.

In his seminal article Mourning and Melancholia, which I discuss at length later in this paper, Freud compared a state of melancholia to a state of mourning, and indicated that the eventual ability of the mourner to liberate the lost object and, by means of this liberation, to invest his or her mental energy in new endeavors constitutes a “normal” process. Freud called this process of separation from the lost object “the work of mourning” (Freud, 1915). The recognition that parting from the object of mourning is a condition of normal work of mourning has led