Mourning and melancholia, according to Freud, are two ways in which people treat and relate to themselves, two cases in which people are placed over against themselves. In studying and observing melancholia, Freud noticed two things. Firstly, the melancholic person undergoes a process in which a splitting of the ego occurs. And secondly, the boundaries separating the melancholic self from the self of a specific other become blurred and eventually disappear.
The events of mourning and melancholia allowed Freud to discover that the psyche had a structure because they showed him that there were certain patterns governing and leading to the taking place of mourning and melancholia.
Freud analyzed and studied cases in which people would feel a radical loss of self-esteem or would undergo severe episodes of self-criticism. This means that Freud’s analysis of depression did not study all forms of depression, but rather only focused on mourning and melancholia.
Mourning
The mourner is always linked together with the lost loved one in a relation of sadness. The mourner is always found in a relation of which the absence of the loved one is a constitutive part. This relation makes clear and understandable what mourning is.
The sadness permeating the mourner is the mourner’s way of maintaining a connection to the lost loved one. Sadness is what links together the mourner and the dead. This sadness is also the mourner’s attempt at accepting the loss arising from the death of the lost one.
This relation, according to Freud, occurs as a process whose culmination or conclusion is that the mourner carries out an emotional reorientation by accepting the loss of the loved one and by living in accordance with this acceptance.
This acceptance of the loss announces the new life linking together the mourner with the dead loved one. A life in which love and memories dwell, a life that allows the ego to reach its freedom and to become uninhibited.
Melancholia
Melancholia resembles mourning, yet it radically differs from it. Melancholia occurs without losing a loved one. During melancholic depression, the melancholic person undergoes severe episodes of self-criticism, through which feelings of inability, failure, and limitedness take over and hold sway. According to Freud, “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself”.
Freud says that melancholia occurs when there is a split in the personality, allowing the self to distance itself from itself so that it could judge itself. Melancholia means that there are two positions that the self can take at any given time; one is the judge, the other is the judged. One is the part that criticizes, the other is the part that is criticized.
“One part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically and, as it were, takes it as its object”. Freud calls this part the superego. It is called the ego because it judges and controls the subject. And it is called the superego because it judges and criticizes the ego itself. That is, in melancholia, the ego is split, placed over against itself through a certain distance that allows what seemed one and united to set itself against itself by distancing itself from itself.
In the splitting of the ego into two, the site in which the “I” is placed changes from one situation to another, since the “I” is sometimes the superego and sometimes the ego. The “I” is sometimes the accuser; the “I” is sometimes the accused. One’s position in this split constantly changes, for one is never one, one has become two.
When I am in the place of the superego, I might criticize myself, judge myself, and accuse myself. When I am in the place of the ego, I become the accused, the judged, and the criticized; I might feel ashamed, guilty, embarrassed. I might also feel depressed without even knowing why I am feeling this depression. Freud says that this ungrounded depression happens when there is an internal criticism, of which I am unaware, taking place inside oneself. There is something taking place inside oneself, of which one is unaware.
Criticism Shifting From Another Onto Oneself In Melancholia
In depression, Freud says, blame and criticism could shift from someone else onto oneself. The self-criticisms of the depressed are perhaps criticisms originally directed at someone else.
The depressed, Freud says, changes and adjusts these criticisms in order to to be in agreement with the current situation or the current events, yet these criticisms remain primarily criticisms directed at someone else, a loved one, or an important figure in the life of the depressed. “So we find the key to the clinical picture: we perceive that the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego.”
This means that at these moments of self-examination and self-confrontation, when the self is supposedly the nearest, the boundaries separating oneself from the other are confused, blurred, and obscured. The self-criticism directed at oneself is originally a criticism directed at a loved one, hiding itself and concealing itself from oneself into oneself.
Deception, confusion, and concealment thus belong to any attempt at honestly confronting oneself, any attempt at coming near to oneself. Obscurity lies at the heart of any endeavor to know oneself.
One confuses oneself with the other and proceeds toward an illusory understanding of oneself, a confused knowing of oneself, for what was originally directed at the other has been now displaced onto oneself.
Confusion governs and permeates any endeavor to come face to face with oneself, any endeavor to understand oneself, and any attempt at dealing with the other. That is, one’s attempts at coming face to face with oneself, according to Freud, might themselves be symptoms of a disease hiding itself from oneself through what has been displaced onto oneself because of the other.
Asking the most ethical questions does not thus necessarily mean that one is searching for an honest self-knowing of oneself, a genuine self-understanding of oneself, or an honest coming closer to oneself so that a revealing as self-understanding could take place. Perhaps asking the most ethical questions only means that one is placed in an economy of concealing, confusing, and displacing.
This means that the relation linking together oneself with the other is neither simple nor clear, neither straightforward nor defined. The limits separating oneself from the other are blurred.
The anger that one feels toward the other transforms itself and disappears into anger and criticism directed at oneself. This transforming of the direction of one’s anger and criticism is something that is neither intended nor decided and it evades one’s attempts at containing or controlling it.
The Self/Other Relation
Freud says that in this depression, one criticizes and blames oneself only by becoming the other person, only through repeating the other’s acts, at which one’s criticism was originally directed. That is, one transforms oneself into the other and hence becomes worthy of one’s self-criticism.
This process of redirecting what one feels toward the other into oneself problematizes the relation linking oneself with the other. This process of becoming the other problematizes any notion of “self” or “oneself”, any notion of a contained “self”.
Freud says that what renders this changing of character possible is a set of powerful fantasies, for one does not only want to imitate or to be like the other, but rather one becomes the other.
One forms and re-shapes one’s ego in the image of the other in such a way that renders completely unknown and unclear where one’s blame is directed when one blames oneself for something that one has done.
Hence, in the space separating oneself from the other lie confusion, obscurity, and the impossibility of realizing any understanding, knowing, or lucidity, for one begins by criticizing oneself for something that the other was doing, and then one gradually shapes one’s ego in the image of the other, and finally one becomes the other, one becomes who one takes oneself to be, that is, the other.
This means that self-criticism, in this case, is not an attempt at improving oneself. Self-criticism implies that one cannot overcome one’s depression, for any ethical reflection, at this moment, does nothing but reintroduces and reinforces self-criticism.
Ethical reflection does not solve the problem, but rather repeats and intensifies the criticism directed at oneself through oneself, for one does not know what the problem is. The problem hides itself from oneself, for what the ego now wants is only to live and re-live the other’s life and to criticize oneself.
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