34 definitions
The book's index
Mourning and Melancholia
18 concepts · 34 definitions
Melancholia (n.) impoverishes the self: in mourning the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia, the ego itself does.
Melancholia (n.) turns reproach against a loved one into self-reproach: the wife pitying her husband for having such an incapable wife is calling him incapable.
Melancholia (n.) ends as mourning does — mourning declares the object dead; each struggle of ambivalence loosens it by disparaging it and, as it were, killing it.
Melancholia (n.) is a loss hidden from consciousness: the patient knows whom he lost, but not what he lost in him.
Mourning (n.) seems normal only because we know so well how to explain it: an exclusive devotion that leaves nothing for any interest that does not recall the dead.
Mourning (n.) ends because the ego, asked by each memory whether it will share the dead one's fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in being alive to let go.
The Mourning (n.) carries out reality's order piecemeal: each memory and hope bound to the dead is brought up, hypercathected and detached — meanwhile the lost one lives on psychically.
Mourning (n.) follows the loss not only of a loved person but of an abstraction that has taken one's place — a country, liberty, an ideal.
Identification (n.) lets the shadow of the object fall upon the ego — the lost beloved is set up inside, so that object-loss becomes ego-loss and the quarrel with him a split within oneself.
Identification (n.) is the ego's first way of choosing an object — wanting to incorporate it by devouring it; hence the melancholic's refusal of food.
Identification (n.) lets love survive conflict: by becoming the beloved, one need not give the love-relation up.
Mania (n.) is nothing other than a triumph — like the poor wretch who wins a fortune and is freed from worry — except that the ego does not know what it has surmounted.
Mania (n.) shows the subject freed from the lost object, seeking new attachments like a ravenously hungry man.
Libido (n.) never willingly abandons a position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning.
Suicide (n.) is murder turned back: the ego can kill itself only by treating itself as an object, aiming at itself the hostility meant for someone else.
Being in love (n.) and suicide are the two situations in which the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.
Bereavement (n.) is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love to come into the open — the mourner blames himself for having willed the death.
Illness (n.) can be a way of tormenting a loved one without expressing hostility openly — and the person it is aimed at is usually close at hand.
Joy (n.) turns to exultation and triumph when a large expenditure of energy, long kept up, suddenly becomes unnecessary — a false position thrown off at a single blow.