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Authors: Gary Greenberg
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fitting—after all, what would it say about love if we did not grieve over the loss of the beloved?—and temporary. It may not be rational in itself, but mourning makes enough sense for doctors to “ consider interfering with it to be pointless, or even damaging.”
Not so with melancholia , whose cause is hard to discern and which overstays its welcome until interfering seems like a good idea. For Freud, however, the true mark of melancholia, what distinguished it from its domesticated cousin, was not so much its irrationality or its persistence as the melancholic’s loss of self-esteem. “ In mourning , the world has become poor and empty,” he wrote, “in melancholia it is the ego that has become so.” It may be hard to see why a person is mourning, or why he mourns for so long, but it isn’t until mourning turns to self-loathing that you can say for certain that the patient has crossed the border into pathology.
But the fact that the melancholic is ill and that his illness takes the form of being sick of himself should not lead the doctor to conclude that the patient is wrong in his assessment.
It would be fruitless …to contradict the patient who levels such reproaches against his ego in this way. In all likelihood he must in some way be right…He seems only to be grasping the truth more keenly than others who are not melancholic…[If] he describes himself as a petty, egoistic, insincere and dependent person, who has only ever striven to conceal the weakness of his nature…he may as far as we know come quite close to self-knowledge and we can only wonder why one must become ill in order to have access to such truth.
Some melancholics may be mistaken, Freud argued, but the validity of their self-evaluations is not germane to the question of whether they are suffering from melancholia. The true mark of illness is the melancholic’s failure to maintain the sense that he is not petty, egoistic, etc.,
even if he is.
And rest assured he is. Your mum and dad may have fucked you up, but they had plenty of help from you. Like every other child, you loved your parents when they gratified you and hated them when they didn’t, and you started doing that as soon as yourmother’s breast was offered and withdrawn (or perhaps as soon as you were ejected from your timeless, painless, intrauterine life into a world of hunger and need). If you have a strong constitution and parents who know how to do their jobs, you eventually learn to control your love and your hate, to grow an ego that can find strategies to make life less confusing and chaotic, that spares you (and those you love) from your titanic feelings. And one of the first thing that the ego does is fool itself into thinking that it is better, more substantial, and less in thrall to our darkest impulses than it really is.
In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud describes how the ego gets this idea in the first place—and how important it is that it does so. He tells us about the time he observed his eighteen-month-old nephew playing a game with a wooden reel designed to be pulled along the floor by a string. The nephew never used it in this fashion; instead, he repeatedly threw it out of his crib and retrieved it, saying
“fort”
(“gone”) and
“da”
(“there”) as he did. This game, Freud said, was “ related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.” By finding a way to control his rage at being abandoned by his mother, the boy had renounced the pleasure of vengeance and taken a decisive step toward reining in his destructive impulses. This, Freud said, was the basic building block not only of maturity but of civilization itself.
Freud also noticed that his nephew seemed much more interested in the throwing than the retrieving, which he took to mean that mastering loss was more
Not so with melancholia , whose cause is hard to discern and which overstays its welcome until interfering seems like a good idea. For Freud, however, the true mark of melancholia, what distinguished it from its domesticated cousin, was not so much its irrationality or its persistence as the melancholic’s loss of self-esteem. “ In mourning , the world has become poor and empty,” he wrote, “in melancholia it is the ego that has become so.” It may be hard to see why a person is mourning, or why he mourns for so long, but it isn’t until mourning turns to self-loathing that you can say for certain that the patient has crossed the border into pathology.
But the fact that the melancholic is ill and that his illness takes the form of being sick of himself should not lead the doctor to conclude that the patient is wrong in his assessment.
It would be fruitless …to contradict the patient who levels such reproaches against his ego in this way. In all likelihood he must in some way be right…He seems only to be grasping the truth more keenly than others who are not melancholic…[If] he describes himself as a petty, egoistic, insincere and dependent person, who has only ever striven to conceal the weakness of his nature…he may as far as we know come quite close to self-knowledge and we can only wonder why one must become ill in order to have access to such truth.
Some melancholics may be mistaken, Freud argued, but the validity of their self-evaluations is not germane to the question of whether they are suffering from melancholia. The true mark of illness is the melancholic’s failure to maintain the sense that he is not petty, egoistic, etc.,
even if he is.
And rest assured he is. Your mum and dad may have fucked you up, but they had plenty of help from you. Like every other child, you loved your parents when they gratified you and hated them when they didn’t, and you started doing that as soon as yourmother’s breast was offered and withdrawn (or perhaps as soon as you were ejected from your timeless, painless, intrauterine life into a world of hunger and need). If you have a strong constitution and parents who know how to do their jobs, you eventually learn to control your love and your hate, to grow an ego that can find strategies to make life less confusing and chaotic, that spares you (and those you love) from your titanic feelings. And one of the first thing that the ego does is fool itself into thinking that it is better, more substantial, and less in thrall to our darkest impulses than it really is.
In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud describes how the ego gets this idea in the first place—and how important it is that it does so. He tells us about the time he observed his eighteen-month-old nephew playing a game with a wooden reel designed to be pulled along the floor by a string. The nephew never used it in this fashion; instead, he repeatedly threw it out of his crib and retrieved it, saying
“fort”
(“gone”) and
“da”
(“there”) as he did. This game, Freud said, was “ related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.” By finding a way to control his rage at being abandoned by his mother, the boy had renounced the pleasure of vengeance and taken a decisive step toward reining in his destructive impulses. This, Freud said, was the basic building block not only of maturity but of civilization itself.
Freud also noticed that his nephew seemed much more interested in the throwing than the retrieving, which he took to mean that mastering loss was more
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