Mourning and melancholy

Mourning and Melancholia is a Freudian article that has become a must-read for anyone interested in the pervasive topic of depression and so-called bipolar disorders. Written in 1915, Mourning and Melancholia explores the two states that give the work its title, highlighting the natural aspect of the former and the complex and enigmatic aspect of the latter.

Furthermore, the article integrates – with “The Drives and Their Destinies”, “Repression”, “The Unconscious” and “Metapsychological Complement to the Theory of Dreams” – the so-called “Metapsychology”, a set of articles written by Freud in record time, one after the other, intended to provide an exhaustive description of mental processes, recording the main developments of psychoanalytic theory up to that point.

In contemporary depressions, according to the author's name, a certain subjective emptiness and a feeling of loss of meaning in life's common initiatives can be observed.

Informed by theories from psychoanalysis itself and by various contributions from sociology, Sandra Edler in Mourning and Melancholy suggests that our time is a victim of an inflation of the imaginary, a narcissistic time, of passion for one's own image, in which science's nod to the possibility of manufacturing clones would be the extreme expression.