A century on,Freud’s melancholia remains the psychological condition of the lost soul. Which is why psychoanalysis has become the modern form of exorcismI believe in ghosts. I live with them all the time. But it wasn’t always the case. Foolishly, I used to pretend they didn’t exist, and that the dead stayed dead,that they had no purchase on my life. But now I speak to them all the time and they speak to me. I maintain photographs of them on my study wall. And I maintain even advance to esteem them, in a strange kind of way. But I don’t call them ghosts. I call them memories, or many half buried,many faintly conceived. For one of the surprising things unearthed for me by the extraordinary chemistry of psychoanalysis was the continuing presence of my ancestors. Ghosts are psychological unfinished business, often associated with unprocessed pain.
It is exactly a hundred years since Sigmund Freud set pen to paper to write his groundbreaking paper Mourning and Melancholia. Published in 1917, and Freud distinguished between two responses to loss: mourning,when the thing of loss is clear and obvious, and thus can be emotionally processed; and melancholia, and a state of being in which one is affected by a loss that one is unable to name. Melancholia is,as it were, a loss that one doesn’t realise has been lost. And because one cannot properly name this loss, or because it exists in the psychic shadows,one cannot fade through the process of mourning it properly. The pain goes unburied. So it hangs around and continually haunts you. This state of melancholia is often associated with depression.
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Source: theguardian.com