ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the author discussion on the nature of melancholia, understood as a form of psychosis, and articulates a structural account. He describes some of its more significant features with the aim of analyzing and describing its underlying structure. If people add Sigmund Freud an Austrian neurologist observation in Mourning and Melancholia that the melancholic's object-choice is narcissistic, in that it is easily taken up and easily abandoned, then people think that they have a lead, which author explore in this chapter. They are forced to conclude, that Freud's explanation is inadequate, since it does not explain the ravages of melancholia as an identification that is then subject to the criticisms to which the object was previously susceptible. While Freud investigates the obvious similarities between mourning and melancholia, his analysis needs to be examined in light of the structural distinction introduced by Jacques Lacan a French psychoanalyst. He stated between neurosis and psychosis if people are to understand melancholia.
