Sigmund Freud – Mourning and Melancholia (1915-17)

Drawing heavily from the Narcissism essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” is an attempt to understand the rare times when an ego “[overcomes] the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (584).Whereas in mourning, the lost object, though repeated reality-testing, is successfully identified and then replaced with another object-cathexis, in melancholia,the unknown loss results in the free libido being “displaced on to another object,” but rather being “withdrawn into the ego” (586), which results in “an impoverishment of the ego on a grand scale” (584). “In this way object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss.” Put otherwise, this is the mirror-image of the “On Narcissism” essay, in that his return to the self represents a violent (not erotic) “regression from one type of object-choie to original narcissism.” Identification with the love-object supersedes object-love:

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. (587)

Freud goes on:

The difference, however, between narcissistic and hysterical identification (melancholia) may be seen in this: that, whereas in the former the object-cathexis is abndoned, in the latter it persists and manifests its influence. (587)

In other words, the melancholic does not properly digest the object of mourning. It gets stuck. The processes of reality-testing–going out into the world and coming back to the self–is stunted. In extreme form, the melancholic subject develops sadism directed at the ego, because the ego is thought to be responsible for the lost object. This is the crucial point that turns the ego against the drive for self-preservation:

Owing to the return of the object-cathexis, [the ego] can treat itself as an object–if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which reates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world. (588)

So whereas in mourning, time is needed for reality-testing to free the ego of its libido of the lost object, “the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies…from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (589). This image, besides bearing an uncanny resemblance to Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh,” totally disrupts the metaphor of diachronic digestion–it is directionless and therefore dangerous. [See Deleuze “Body Without Organs” for reading of this topography as potentially liberating.]

Sigmund Freud – “On Narcissism” (1913-14)

Whereas formerly, Freud (and others) thought of ego-libido and object-libido as separate drives, and of the human as carrying on a twofold existence–“one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily” (549) ( Similar division can be found in Darwin, Mill, and Nietzsche, to name only a few)–the essay “On Narcissism” attempts to theorize a single force behind both pleasure and self-preservation. In the post-war writings, Freud will “solve” this problem in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Here, Freud suggests that Narcissism might not be a “perversion,” but rather “the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature” (546).

Thus Freud notes, “The first autoerotic sexual satisfactions are experiences in connection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation.” This initial self-directed relationship, under the first topography, gets directed outward into objects; but in the second topography, Freud beings to conceive of an “ego-ideal” that is set up as “the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (558). Thus Freud argues,

The formation of the ego-ideal is often confused with the sublimation of instinct, to the detriment of our understanding of the facts…As we have learnt, the formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favoring repression; sublimation is a way out, a way by which those demands can be met without involving repression.

Thus instinct, the drive for self-preservation, is preserved in the very act of satisfying the pleasure principle.

Freud offers will become only a provisional “single-drive” theory—a distinctively optimistic, pre-war outlook: “The return of the object-libido to the ego and its transformation into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once morel and, on the other hand, it is also true that a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished” (561). In terms of taste and food, aesthetics and nutritive consumption, this amounts to a convergence of the realms of freedom and necessity.

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“On Narcissism,” from The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (1989).