Freud - Complete Works (505 page)

Mourning And Melancholia

3047

   There is no difficulty in
reconstructing this process. An object choice, an attachment of the
libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing
to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person,
the relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one
of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement
of it on to a new one, but something different, for whose coming
about various conditions seem to be necessary. The object-cathexis
proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an
end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it
was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in
any unspecified way, but served to establish an
identification
of the ego with the abandoned object. 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. In this way an object-loss was
transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and
the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of
the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

   One or two things may be directly
inferred with regard to the preconditions and effects of a process
such as this. On the one hand, a strong fixation to the loved
object must have been present; on the other hand, in contradiction
to this, the object-cathexis must have had little power of
resistance. As Otto Rank has aptly remarked, this contradiction
seems to imply that the object-choice has been effected on a
narcissistic basis, so that the object-cathexis, when obstacles
come in its way, can regress to narcissism. The narcissistic
identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the
erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the
conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given
up. This substitution of identification for object-love is an
important mechanism in the narcissistic affections; Karl Landauer
(1914) has lately been able to point to it in the process of
recovery in a case of schizophrenia. It represents, of course, a
regression
from one type of object-choice to original
narcissism. We have elsewhere shown that identification is a
preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way - and
one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion - in which the ego
picks out an object. 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. Abraham is undoubtedly right in attributing to this
connection the refusal of nourishment met with in severe forms of
melancholia.

Mourning And Melancholia

3048

   The conclusion which our theory
would require - namely, that the disposition to fall ill of
melancholia (or some part of that disposition) lies in the
predominance of the narcissistic type of object-choice - has
unfortunately not yet been confirmed by observation. In the opening
remarks of this paper, I admitted that the empirical material upon
which this study is founded is insufficient for our needs. If we
could assume an agreement between the results of observation and
what we have inferred, we should not hesitate to include this
regression from object-cathexis to the still narcissistic oral
phase of the libido in our characterization of melancholia.
Identifications with the object are by no means rare in the
transference neuroses either; indeed, they are a well-known
mechanism of symptom-formation, especially in hysteria. The
difference, however, between narcissistic and hysterical
identification may be seen in this: that, whereas in the former the
object-cathexis is abandoned, in the latter it persists and
manifests its influence, though this is usually confined to certain
isolated actions and innervations. In any case, in the transference
neuroses, too, identification is the expression of there being
something in common, which may signify love. Narcissistic
identification is the older of the two and it paves the way to an
understanding of hysterical identification, which has been less
thoroughly studied.

   Melancholia, therefore, borrows
some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process
of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism. It is
on the one hand, like mourning, a reaction to the real loss of a
loved object; but over and above this, it is marked by a
determinant which is absent in normal mourning or which, if it is
present, transforms the latter into pathological mourning. The loss
of a love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in
love-relationships to make itself effective and come into the open.
Where there is a disposition to obsessional neurosis the conflict
due to ambivalence gives a pathological cast to mourning and forces
it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches to the effect
that the mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved
object, i.e. that he has willed it. These obsessional states of
depression following upon the death of a loved person show us what
the conflict due to ambivalence can achieve by itself when there is
no regressive drawing-in of libido as well. In melancholia, the
occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the most part
beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those
situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can
import opposed feelings of love and hate into the relationship or
reinforce an already existing ambivalence. This conflict due to
ambivalence, which sometimes arises more from real experiences,
sometimes more from constitutional factors, must not be overlooked
among the preconditions of melancholia. 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. The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is
without doubt enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding
phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of
sadism and hate ¹ which relate to an object, and which
have been turned round upon the subject’s own self in the
ways we have been discussing. In both disorders the patients
usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment,
in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their
loved one through their illness, having resorted to it in order to
avoid the need to express their hostility to him openly. After all,
the person who has occasioned the patient’s emotional
disorder, and on whom his illness is centred, is usually to be
found in his immediate environment. The melancholic’s erotic
cathexis in regard to his object has thus undergone a double
vicissitude: part of it has regressed to identification, but the
other part, under the influence of the conflict due to
‘ambivalence, has been carried back to the stage of sadism
which is nearer to that conflict.

  
¹
For the distinction between the two, see my
paper on ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’.

Mourning And Melancholia

3049

   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 instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is
the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the
fear that emerges at a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how
that ego can consent to its own destruction. We have long known, it
is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has
not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against
others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of
forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. 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.¹ Thus in
regression from narcissistic object-choice the object has, it is
true, been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful
than the ego itself. In the two opposed situations of being most
intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the
object, though in totally different ways.

   As regards one particular
striking feature of melancholia that we have mentioned, the
prominence of the fear of becoming poor, it seems plausible to
suppose that it is derived from anal erotism which has been torn
out of its context and altered in a regressive sense.

   Melancholia confronts us with yet
other problems, the answer to which in part eludes us. The fact
that it passes off after a certain time has elapsed without leaving
traces of any gross changes is a feature it shares with mourning.
We found by way of explanation that in mourning time is needed for
the command of reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and
that when this work has been accomplished the ego will have
succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object. We may
imagine that the ego is occupied with analogous work during the
course of a melancholia; in neither case have we any insight into
the economics of the course of events. The sleeplessness in
melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition, the
impossibility of effecting the general drawing-in of cathexes
necessary for sleep. The complex of melancholia behaves like an
open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies - which in the
transference neuroses we have called ‘anticathexes’ -
from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally
impoverished. It can easily prove resistant to the ego’s wish
to sleep.

   What is probably a somatic
factor, and one which cannot be explained psychogenically, makes
itself visible in the regular amelioration in the condition that
takes place towards evening. These considerations bring up the
question whether a loss in the ego irrespectively of the object - a
purely narcissistic blow to the ego - may not suffice to produce
the picture of melancholia and whether an impoverishment of
ego-libido directly due to toxins may not be able to produce
certain forms of the disease.

  
¹
Cf. ‘Instincts and their
Vicissitudes’.

Mourning And Melancholia

3050

   The most remarkable
characteristic of melancholia, and the one in most need of
explanation, is its tendency to change round into mania - a state
which is the opposite of it in its symptoms. As we know, this does
not happen to every melancholia. Some cases run their course in
periodic relapses, during the intervals between which signs of
mania may be entirely absent or only very slight. Others show the
regular alternation of melancholic and manic phases which has led
to the hypothesis of a circular insanity. One would be tempted to
regard these cases as non-psychogenic, if it were not for the fact
that the psycho-analytic method has succeeded in arriving at a
solution and effecting a therapeutic improvement in several cases
precisely of this kind. It is not merely permissible, therefore,
but incumbent upon us to extend an analytic explanation of
melancholia to mania as well.

   I cannot promise that this
attempt will prove entirely satisfactory. It hardly carries us much
beyond the possibility of taking one’s initial bearings. We
have two things to go upon: the first is a psycho-analytic
impression, and the second what we may perhaps call a matter of
general economic experience. The impression which several
psycho-analytic investigators have already put into words is that
the content of mania is no different from that of melancholia, that
both disorders are wrestling with the same ‘complex’,
but that probably in melancholia the ego has succumbed to the
complex whereas in mania it has mastered it or pushed it aside. Our
second pointer is afforded by the observation that all states such
as joy, exultation or triumph, which give us the normal model for
mania, depend on the same economic conditions. What has happened
here is that, as a result of some influence, a large expenditure of
psychical energy, long maintained or habitually occurring, has at
last become unnecessary, so that it is available for numerous
applications and possibilities of discharge - when, for instance,
some poor wretch, by winning a large sum of money, is suddenly
relieved from chronic worry about his daily bread, or when a long
and arduous struggle is finally crowned with success, or when a man
finds himself in a position to throw off at a single blow some
oppressive compulsion, some false position which he has long had to
keep up, and so on. All such situations are characterized by high
spirits, by the signs of discharge of joyful emotion and by
increased readiness for all kinds of action - in just the same way
as in mania, and in complete contrast to the depression and
inhibition of melancholia. We may venture to assert that mania is
nothing other than a triumph of this sort, only that here again
what the ego has surmounted and what it is triumphing over remain
hidden from it. Alcoholic intoxication, which belongs to the same
class of states, may (in so far as it is an elated one) be
explained in the same way; here there is probably a suspension,
produced by toxins, of expenditures of energy in repression. The
popular view likes to assume that a person in a manic state of this
kind finds such delight in movement and action because he is so
‘cheerful’. This false connection must of course be put
right. The fact is that the economic condition in the
subject’s mind referred to above has been fulfilled, and this
is the reason why he is in such high spirits on the one hand and so
uninhibited in action on the other.