ABSTRACT
When Sigmund Freud wrote "Mourning and melancholia" in 1915, he theorised that the work of mourning is accomplished through a displacement of the libido attached to a lost object onto a new object. But, a few years later, after the death of his beloved daughter Sophie, Freud wrote to Sandor Ferenczi, on 4 February 1920, that he had suffered an "irreparable wound". Freud's corrections include the refutation of any cause and effect relation between Sophie's death and the introduction of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Jenseits was written in 1919 she died in January 1920. Freud was aware that his political analysis of groups and masses, although incomplete, must apply to the psychoanalytic movement with its revolutionary contribution and he took advantage of the opportunity offered by the next congress, held in The Hague, to play a more discreet role.
