Reading Response 7 - Mourning and Melancholia

I found the text of Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud extremely interesting. A part of the text that I was particularly drawn to was page 155. The text explains the difference between melancholy and grief; they both are caused by loss and represent feelings of sadness but are not the same. Grief is the feeling after someone has passed or something is no longer existing or living, and melancholy is a feeling of sadness but with no particular reason or apparent cause. They produce very similar effects on the person who experiences them, but melancholy, Freud explains, has an impact on self-esteem as well. The ego of a person experiencing melancholy is hurt severely. This person believes himself to be worthless and thus not expect others to treat him or her as worthy. The text explains that the person experiencing these feelings is not able to point out what is happening to him/her but, instead, believes he has always felt this way and that he or she has always been worthless but that that realization has just struck them; “Only, the inhibition of the melancholiac displays something else which is lacking in grief — an extraordinary fall in his self-esteem, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.” I did not know much about melancholy, it is not a term I hear about often (fortunately), and I did not realize that grief and melancholy were so different.