ABSTRACT
In the first of two Freud chapters, the focus is on works from the second decade of the twentieth century. A detailed close reading of “Mourning and Melancholia”, one of Freud’s most admired works, establishes a style and template for this book. Though heralded-each in a different theoretical way—by Totem and Taboo and “On Narcissism”, it still seems surprising that this paper on loss, grief, and the failure to grieve appeared only at this relatively advanced moment in Freud’s career. Concomitantly with this growing interest in how we deal with life’s losses, Freud becomes more thoroughly engaged with the internal world, and “internality” itself, during the years of the First World War. He turns to the notion of identification to explain melancholia, and his burgeoning use of the term “introjection” (coined not by him but by Ferenczi) is another indication of how such thinking was unfolding in his mind at the time. The chapter suggests that one may detect a tacit, implicit, perhaps unconscious reliance on the metaphors of digestion in this seminal paper, something that would become clearer and more explicit in Freud’s later theoretical development.
