Teaching Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia“

The chapter discusses Sigmund Freud: Karl Abraham; Mourning and Melancholia and Freud's subsequent developments; a selected post-Freudian contribution: the Kleinian approach; and a seminar on the chronological reading of Freud's texts. It presents only the main ideas of Melanie Klein and of her followers in the field of object relationships, love and hate, introjection, projection, denial, splitting, because they are mainly rooted in Freud's Mourning and Melancholia. In melancholia, however, the individual does not withdraw libido from the lost object: the ego devours the object in fantasy in order not to separate from it, in order to be as one with it–this is the path to narcissistic identification. Melanie Klein took as her model the purified pleasure-ego described by Freud in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, as well as the notions of projection and introjection that are associated with it, in particular in Mourning and Melancholia.