ABSTRACT
The connection between loss, separation, and depression is quite accepted, both within and outside psychoanalytic writings on the subject. What determines whether depression follows a loss or a series of losses depends on what the child or the adult has made of the loss and how he or she has reacted to it. Depression is one way of reacting to loss. The capacity to mourn and to grieve is a kind of psychic insurance against depression. Depression is not an automatic consequence of loss. Sigmund Freud's 1917 paper "Mourning and Melancholia" is the foundation for the psychoanalytic understanding and formulation of loss and depression. Freud compared the state of mourning to that of melancholia in order to understand melancholia, by which he meant psychotic depression or manic-depressive psychosis. In contemporary psychoanalytic theory these primitive introjective identifications, with their omnipotent character, would be understood as functioning as a defence against separateness and loss.
