“yas ve melankoli” makalesinde benlik, kendilik ve nesne ilişkileri

When listening to a person, it is easy to understand his descriptions of his internal object representations. The relationship between one’s ego and one’s self is more difficult to discern. In this article, I first explored how the words “I” and “self” could be used to distinguish and describe the ego and the self-representation. This approach helped me to define the concept of “self”. I have referred to Hartmann’s distinction between ego and self and some of Winnicott’s conceptualizations of self. In examining the relationship between ego and self, I tried to show that the ego is at the service of the self. In this respect, I mentioned that an important function of the ego is to preserve self.

In light of these, when I looked at Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” article, I saw that he had focused on some basic issues in terms of self and object relations. He had clarified the relationship of the ego with the internal self and object representations, too. Although Freud did not conceptualize the “self”, I have uncovered his thoughts about it from the way he used the word “self”. While listing the differences between grief and melancholy in the article, some points came up. These points are ego’s; evaluation of the worth of the self and the object, constituting representations of the lost object and time, differentiating the self and the object, positioning the object representation in the internal and external world and using the object in regulating the narcissism of the self.

These are factors that determine whether the reaction to loss is going to be a normal or pathological grief or melancholia. We can conclude that grief separates ego, self, and object. If the ego had separated the self and the object before the separation occurred in real life, mourning could have taken place. But if there is dependence between the self and the object, a narcissistic wound and a melancholic breakdown may occur.