Melancholia: From “Mourning” to Suicide

In the light of our hypothesis of incorporation, is it possible to interpret the struggle of “love and hate” in a subject who, according to Freud, has in fact been disappointed in and mistreated by the love object? We find it crucial to affirm the prior existence of a love totally free of ambivalence, to insist on the undisclosable character of this love, and finally to show that a real and therefore traumatic cause had put an end to it. The system of counter-investments—using the themes of hate, disappointment, and mistreatment supposedly endured on account of the object—results from some traumatic affliction and from the utter impossibility of mourning. Hence the fantasized aggression is not in fact primary; it merely extends the genuine aggression the object actually suffered earlier in the form of death, disgrace, or removal—-this being the involuntary cause of the separation. Inclusion does not occur unless the subject is convinced of the object’s total innocence…

This is why melancholics cherish the memory as their most precious possession, even though it must be concealed by a crypt built with the bricks of hate and aggression. It should be remarked that as long as the crypt holds, there is no melancholia. It erupts when the walls are shaken, often as a result of the loss of some secondary love-object who had buttressed them. Faced with the danger of seeing the crypt crumble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt, showing the concealed object of love in its own guise. Threatened with the imminent loss of its internal support—the kernel of its being-—the ego will fuse with the included object, imagining that the object is bereft of its partner. Consequently, the ego begins the public display of an interminable process of mourning. The subject heralds the love-object’s sadness, his gaping wound, his universal guilt—without ever revealing, of course, the unspeakable secret, well worth the entire universe. The only means left by which the subject can covertly revive the secret paradise taken from him is to stage the grief attributed to the object who lost him. Freud is surprised that melancholics show no shame at all at the horrible things for which they blame themselves. Now we can understand it: the more suffering and degradation the object undergoes (meaning: the more he pines for the subject he lost), the prouder the subject can be: “he endures all this because of me.” Being a melancholic, I stage and let everyone else see the full extent of my love object’s grief over having lost me.

N. Abraham and M. Torok: Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation

(Source: sas.upenn.edu)