ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how melancholic processes, or rather melancholic incorporations, are at work in different forms of chronic depression that cover various clinical configurations. Starting from Freud's formulation, "The shadow of the object has fallen on the Ego", a first red thread will consist in highlighting, from the clinical point of view, the main figures of the patient's incorporative identifications and in evoking some directions of the analytical technique in order to free oneself, patient as analyst, from this shadow of the object which also falls on the analytical cure. This chapter will also put forward the hypothesis that one of the specificities of the work of "disincorporating" the shadow of the object, during an analytical therapy, consists in focusing on the way it also fell on the patient's body. The traumatic characteristics of the first encounter with the object have in fact been inscribed in the primary language of the sensorimotors experienced, and the analytical technique will aim to revive the processes of symbolization of these experiences characterized by an indifferentiation between body and psyche. It is a question of giving trends and figures to the shadow of the object incorporated by the self, by mobilizing what contemporary analysts call the primary forms of symbolization.
