Mourning and Melancholia
Freud's first psychoanalytic study, Grieving and Melancholia (1917), addressed normal and pathological grief, major affective disorders, and psychodynamic depression. The superego, identity processes, and antagonism of psychopathology emerged early. The centrality of aggression turned against the self when the lost object is invested with intensely ambivalent feelings, the role of the superego in this self-directed aggression, the split in the self revealed in the superego's attack on the ego, and the fusion of a part of the self with an internalized object as the victim of the superego's attack are all proposed. \n
In melancholia, on the other hand, the ambivalent relationship to the lost thing makes the person feel very guilty and turns the unconscious aggressive attack on the lost thing into an attack on a part of the ego that is connected to the lost thing. This self-attack stops the narcissistic pleasure of being alive and makes the pathological mourning process worse and last longer.
Klein said that in melancholia, this hatred is destructive to both the internal and external good objects, making the person feel empty and like they've lost something. Because the idealized object is attacked and destroyed, a vicious circle of guilt develops in which the bad self is attacked, not the internalized object. Suicide would be an unconscious attempt to get rid of the bad parts of oneself and save the good parts.
Edward Bibring wrote in 1953 that depression is caused when a person realizes they have lost their ideal self and there is a big difference between the ideal self and the real self.
Depression can be caused by the loss of an ideal self-state, which can be set off by a mother's failure as a child or by an attack on the self by the superego at a later time. The basic mechanism is a connection between the loss of an ideal self-state and the loss of an ideal object.
Jacobson talked about how self and object representations were originally fused or not differentiable in both the libidinal and aggressive domains of experience. He also talked about how libidinal self and object representations became fused again as a form of defense during psychotic regression.
According to Jacobson's theory, borderline patients have persistent self-object boundaries in both the libidinal and the aggressive areas of internalized object relations, which enables them to use projection, depersonalization, and dissociation to protect themselves from the cruel superego attacks of depression. Despite still experiencing the superego's attacks in the form of exaggerated, pathological guilt and self-devaluation in neurotic depression, a sufficiently integrated self relating to integrated representations of significant others does not go through the fusion processes that, in melancholia, transform guilt into a complete delusional devaluation of the self identified with the object nor the primitive defenses of borderline conditions.
Under situations of various sources of unconscious guilt, a depressive-masochistic personality structure predisposes to characterological depression and a loss of normal self-esteem, as decided by the superego. This is the inverse of anxiety activation as a nonspecific manifestation of threat resulting from unconscious intrapsychic conflict (Kernberg,1992). Anxiety, in fact, can serve as a warning sign of the impending threat of unconscious guilt and item loss, which can lead to sadness.
\n \n