Bonus: (sub)Text #4: Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (Part One)

0:06 Unknown speaker: Hey, it's another preview of Wes's subtext project. This is the first half of episode four on Freud's mourning and melancholia. You can only hear the first half here. If you want to get the whole thing, you can only do that by becoming a partially examined Life Citizen@PartiallyExaminedLife.com or a Patreon Subscriber at the $5 level at Patreon.comPartiallyExaminedLife.

0:28 Wes: this is Wes Alwan, and I'm joined by guests Tracy Morgan and Louis Scuderi. Tracy is a practicing psychoanalyst and host of the podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis. And Lewis is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Welcome to both of you.

0:42 Unknown speaker: Thank you.

Thank you.

0:44 Wes: So why don't you guys introduce yourselves a little more? Tracy, start with you. I know you both in New York, and, Tracy, you've been a psychoanalyst for quite some time now.

0:57 Unknown speaker: That's true. I'm a psychoanalyst here in New York City, and I'm also on the faculty of the center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. Also, I'm a founding member of the group Das Unbehagen here in New York that has really shaken up psychoanalysis in fair Gotham. So here I am, and I'm really pleased to be on the program.

1:15 Wes: And you and I know each other? We were once classmates.

1:19 Unknown speaker: It's not biblical, right?

But yeah.

Yes, we were once classmates.

1:22 Wes: Over the years, I have taken classes at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. And you were commuting up here to take classes as well?

1:30 Unknown speaker: That's how we met, probably 10 years ago.

How far did you go in the training list?

1:34 Wes: Well, I was doing something called the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, which used

1:40 Unknown speaker: to be the Institute for the Study of Violence.

1:42 Wes: Yes. Which I also had been part of that, and then I had done some work in the clinical program, and now I'm actually recently back. I'm actually working on an lmhc, and then I'll get the doctorate, the clinical doctorate.

1:54 Unknown speaker: All right.

That's awesome.

Good for you.

1:57 Wes: Yeah.

1:58 Unknown speaker: That's amazing. That's amazing.

1:59 Wes: I quit my day job, and, I mean, I sort of have another day job. I'm residence director of a group home for the mentally ill, and then I'm working on this degree, so.

2:10 Unknown speaker: Wow.

2:10 Wes: And, Lewis, you're a practicing psychotherapist?

2:14 Unknown speaker: Yeah, so I work at a clinic that's affiliated with a psychoanalytic institute in New York, and my training's in social work.

I also am a social worker. I Mean, that's my license that I practice under.

I'm about to start training at npap, which is the National Psychological association for Psychoanalysis.

2:36 Wes: Okay.

2:37 Unknown speaker: Also in New York, founded by Theodor Reik as part of the lay analysis controversy that involved Freud. And he wrote a book about who

supervised my deceased analyst, Phyllis Meadow. So that makes us potentially, as you study, there, will be related.

Wow. We're all related in psychoanalysis and some form or another.

2:56 Wes: For better or for worse.

2:58 Unknown speaker: For better or for worse.

3:01 Wes: So the reason why I invited you guys on is I've long been thinking about doing a spin off podcast and I'm just sort of experimenting with that now. And I'm doing different. I'm looking at different subject areas. But of course, psychoanalysis is one of the things I've been thinking about and I get a lot of requests for that. So anyone who listens to one of the partially examined life psychoanalysis episodes, I often get mail saying, I wish you'd do more that or I wish you'd do another podcast on that. So, Tracy, I immediately thought of you, of course, because you're an experienced podcaster and you were a beloved, enlightening classmate. And Louis, you just.

3:38 Unknown speaker: Sarah and I've been melancholic.

3:40 Wes: Yes, as probably we all have and still are to some extent. And Louis, you just serendipitously sent me an email because I had put out feelers a while back on Facebook. This has been a very, very slow process mentioning that I might do something. And you had seen that and wrote me an email asking me to consider you as part of the project. And I thought coincidence is as good a reason as any to experiment. So you wrote a very nice email with very thoughtful proposal.

4:09 Unknown speaker: So maybe we should read Jung on synchronicity then.

4:13 Wes: Exactly. And the other thing, I just sort of. I didn't give a great deal of thought to what we were going to read. But Mourning and Melancholy has always been a favorite of mine. And I've read about it and written about it and thought about it quite a bit. And then it's a very central. Mourning is a very central concept in psychoanalysis and it's got a lot of connections to different ideas, as we'll see this in this paper. Concepts of identification and narcissism and incorporation, orality

4:48 Unknown speaker: devouring.

Interestingly, mourning is not discussed nearly as much as melancholia is in this paper. That's right. Although mourning is such a fundamental concept in post Freudian psychoanalysis, Probably all of

us have read this paper like, what, 10 times? You know what I mean? It's a jazz standard of a paper. It's a paper that's also read outside of psychoanalytic training. But it's beloved, I think, amongst many different schools of thought. It's a place that different institutes and, you know, sort of frames for psychoanalytic understanding return. And we do different things with the paper itself. I was struck initially that, you know, mourning, in the way that Freud is writing about it, is about death. Melancholia is surviving the loss of. It's not about death.

It never really was so plain to me in reading this paper that I was like, yeah, it's less taxing. In a certain way. Melancholia is. Could I get this object back? And hence it begins. It's sort of devouring and voracious. The subject devours herself in an attempt to sort of keep the object alive. That is, maybe around the corner, you know, or down the street or the next town over. But the loss is of someone who is in this paper. It's the loss of someone who is. Who's alive versus mourning is. Can you mourn the loss of someone who's alive?

6:13 Wes: So, yeah, this is a really interesting part of the paper because it's one of the things. When I first read it, I was surprised. You know, typically, we all think of mourning in relation to death. And it will turn out, I think, you know, as you said, Tracy, there's an asymmetry between mourning and melancholia, where Freud will say, well, mourning actually is principally about death, which I think the later psychoanalytic tradition will revise that. And melancholia is a much broader idea, although in the beginning. And let me just read what he says is the cause of mourning in the beginning.

He is also sort of treating mourning as having this broad range of stimuli. So he says mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal and so on. Which, when I first read that, that was, like many things in the paper, eye opening and startling to me. I hadn't thought about mourning except in the more literal sense of the actual death of someone.

7:13 Unknown speaker: It's funny, Wes, that you. I mean, I pulled that quote, but I only pulled the part about takes place in the loss of one's country, liberty and ideal and so on. And so I was like, yeah, right. Are we in the state of mourning? I think it looks more like melancholia to me, but we should talk about

7:31 Wes: some of that at the end of the podcast, I think we should talk about some of the therapeutic implications, because it's a central concept in psychoanalysis. Not it has these ties to the idea of the superego and narcissism and paranoia and identification and Tracy, as you mentioned, the oral phase and cannibalistic incorporation. But it's also central to the idea of what is curative about psychoanalysis. So we should talk about that at the very end. And we should also talk about some of the political implications, because I actually think mourning is a very, very rare position in political thinking, and people are usually in a more paranoid, schizoid position.

But we can talk about that later. But the other thing with mourning is he gives us the cause of it, which turns out to be a general definition, although he moves on to a definition of melancholia, which happens to actually be in large part a definition of mourning as well. So he says the distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self reproaches and self revilings and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.

And then he says basically the same thing happens in mourning, except for the loss of self regard, which is a big, big deal. So this is an interesting feature of the structure of this paper, which is that he tells us about what caused this mourning, and then he gives a definition of melancholia, and then his definition of mourning is, well, it's basically the same, except for the loss of self regard, which is the kind of clue that will get us into the rest of his analysis.

9:10 Unknown speaker: There's another thing that crosses my mind, which is that mourning, at least on my read of the paper this time, is quiet. Melancholia will not shut up. So you really know. The mourner is more represented, I think, in an insular state, whereas the melancholic, as we learn, is going on and on and on about their loss of self regard and how terrible I am, et cetera, et cetera. And you hear this and it's about speech. And I didn't have the sense when I read at this time that mourning involves much speech. I don't know, Lewis, did you have a sense of that? I mean, it just was striking to me this time about what's verbal and what's nonverbal. And mourning struck me as Almost like a nonverbal process.

Freud talks about at least this kind of, you know, he doesn't call it a compulsion, but, you know, a certain need or demand that the melancholic makes on other people. To kind of hear their complaints about themselves. And in a classic Freud way, the effect that they have on other people. The effect that the melancholic has other people in there complaining about themselves. Kind of makes them hate them.

10:21 Wes: Yeah.

10:22 Unknown speaker: In the way that the melancholic hates themselves. He does describe mourning as a little more quiet. It's almost as if it's automatic. It just happens.

10:30 Wes: It's interesting that you mentioned that because he does bring up this word, thing, representation. This phrase thing, representation, I guess, which is his way of talking about nonverbal representations in the unconscious.

10:44 Unknown speaker: I think it's towards the end, and I think he almost says. He doesn't say morning remains mysterious. But I think there's some implication of that as well. Because I have that note that there's something that remains mysterious about the process itself.

He says it is really only because we know so well how to explain it. That this attitude does not seem to us so pathological.

There we go. Right. It's like an unthought known. It's sort of in the air. It's almost like a natural. In fact, he says at some level, like it does not need medical intervention. It's a natural process, which of course, we know today. It's. I think it's an. I don't really use the DSM anymore. But isn't it, like now, pathologized morning?

I think there's. There's like complicated grief or complicated mourning. It's like you have a certain amount of time. I think it's six months. And if you're still symptomatic past, then you're in trouble.

11:33 Wes: Failure to get over it syndrome, get over it disorder, FTGO disorder.

11:41 Unknown speaker: But I think it was the DSM hit a new low when it put like, morning. And I was like, really? I was like, so, what are we gonna do about that? Because Freud tells us it's natural. And like the cure for adolescence, like Winnicott says, is time. You know, it's kind of the same thing. Thing I think is implied here with mourning. Moving out of melancholia is not inevitable.

12:03 Wes: Well, let's say. Let's describe in more detail what mourning is and what Freud talks about the work of mourning. Because he has so many interesting things to say about this. He doesn't really get too concrete about, you Know, he doesn't give any four examples. He sort of lets you work it out for yourself. But it's really fascinating because. So, for instance, he says morning is reality testing. You're basically trying to accept at the bottom of 244, in what now does the work which Morning performs consist? I do not think there's anything far fetched in presenting it in the following way, reality testing, and so on and so forth.

So he says in this paragraph, basically people are really resistant to withdrawing what he calls the object cathexis. And here object is this word that Freud, I think he initially used it in. He first defines it in three essays on sexuality. And then of course, it's a big deal in psychoanalysis. Now it's this strange word because it really means human beings, although it can mean a kind of abstract ideal in a way as well.

13:04 Unknown speaker: But this other and what we've made

13:05 Wes: of them, you know, initially it's the object of desire, or it's that thing, as he says in the three essays, it's really whatever can sort of satisfy the aim of a libidinal impulse. So if you think of these libidinal impulses as sort of like arrows emanating from people, the object is that thing which it is seized onto. But I think for listeners who are new to this, you just think of this as another person, but a person insofar as we think of them as the recipients of our libido, the recipients of our desire, although those two are not exactly the same.

13:38 Unknown speaker: It's very complicated, though. Kind of what Freud means by object. Yes, And I think this paper is one of its kind of roles in the Freudian body of work, is that it complicates it even more.

How so?

When he starts talking about mourning and melancholia, it's really apparent that the object, or even just thinking of the object as a person who one is emotionally invested in, is really essential. You know, in the three essays at least, or in kind of Freud's work before this, the object is kind of represented as this contingent, almost part of satisfying your drives. Ultimately, it's kind of replaceable. And as long as it kind of fits the bill of whatever satisfied you in your infancy, then it'll do. Whereas the reaction in mourning seems to imply otherwise about the object.

Really. Now, that's not how I read it this time around. I was like. I was surprised. I was like, oh, right. And so, you know, we of course think back to Freud's On Narcissism, which is really a paper about you know, many things, including love, in which Freud is writing. I think that's 1930.

14:43 Wes: I think it's 1915. Maybe he wrote it like a year before.

14:48 Unknown speaker: It's before this essay.

14:49 Wes: Yeah. So this essay, and I think I forgot to mention, is published in 1917, although he had the idea many, many years before. And then I think he had written it a year or two before. But. Yeah, on narcissism. I think it was written about a year before this and published in 1915 or 14. Sorry.

15:07 Unknown speaker: But he's writing about the importance of love and actually needing an object to love, that one who cannot love will fall ill. And that the person who's mourning, I was thinking, oh, right, the mourning comes to an end because it's time to find a new object to love, to take this libido, this love, whatever you want to call it. I mean, you know, in colloquial terms, like a desire to be connected to another, that the mourner must move on. The melancholic is at risk of, as we'll see as we go through the essay, but the melancholic is at risk of death.

But the mourner needs a place to put this energy. When the morning is done, there is this reserve of energy that needs to be given a place to go. So I saw that as really still. I think what you're saying, Louis, is it's a little bit different than maybe pulling it out of the realm of drive theory and thinking about that the object itself is important. And I was struck in this essay that I was like, I don't know if the particularities of the object matter. We're left with a person who has to do something with in order to live. Maybe I'm mixing a little bit the two essays, but I think they're best friends.

16:14 Wes: I think, Louis, you're getting at the fact. So he uses this phrase in three essays. He says the sexual instinct and sexual object are merely soldered together. That's one of Freud's many, many great lines. And the connection is not as intimate. And he uses that word, intimate, as is usually thought and creates, because he's really talking about vicissitudes, the ways in which the sexual end can kind of just shift around willy nilly. And in mourning and melancholia, we're getting the sense that, well, there can be. Yes, the object is replaceable, Tracy, as you point out. And ultimately, you know, once we've mourned, we have to find a replacement. But there are really severe psychical consequences for object Loss. And I'm not sure that that comes across as much in three essays or.

17:01 Unknown speaker: Yeah, the object is irreplaceable in melancholia, it seems. In mourning, it's a little more unclear. But I guess one thing I was thinking about in saying the object was important was this kind of Freud's almost mystified attitude towards the mood of mourning being a painful one. What is that about? What does that mean?

And laborious labor. Labor, right.

Yeah. It takes a long time.

17:24 Wes: Yeah, let's say what it is exactly. Because he, you know, in this paragraph that I'd been referring to, he says people, they generally resist withdrawing their cathexes. This word he uses, which is a word to describe the occupation like an occupying army, is actually the metaphor. The occupation of the object with libido. And I mean, really, that is literally the metaphor. If a metaphor can be literally something, and people generally resist it, and they will use fantasy to resist it. In mourning, through reality testing, reality actually wins.

But the only way that can happen is if it's carried out bit by bit. So, Tracy, you just mentioned the laboriousness. It really consumes a lot of time and a lot of energy, and it involves this process of. So he talks about. He also uses this word hypercathexis, which I'll let one of you guys explain, but it involves essentially transforming, refashioning the memories of the loved ones. It involves. First, actually, it doesn't involve just this sort of sudden detachment and saying, okay, they're gone. It involves actually going memory by memory.

Because later on in this paper, he'll say that the object, in a way is. Our relationship to the object is determined by just this innumerable number of memories that we have of the object. So we go memory by memory. We hypercathect in a way. We sort of savor that memory, and then we refashion it to say, well, that's all well and good, but that

18:59 Unknown speaker: person is no longer here for listeners to think about. It's like, you know, when someone you love has died, you walk down a certain street that you had a. You were with them once, and you had a particular feeling, and you go back down that street and you are struck by that feeling. And maybe you sit in the curb for a minute, and then. And this is one. And then the rush of the memory comes over you. The feelings come over you. You can almost stop breathing for a minute, you know, and then you get up from that place in the curb and you make it to the corner.

There's so many Streets, Right. Like that. There's so many. There's chairs, there's smells, there's, you know, foods. And you encounter each one when you're in mourning. And it's like the small stab of, like, the realization that this will never be again. And I think that that's a difference between mourning and melancholia. It's this will never be again. As acute as it feels right now, I will never have this with this person. Maybe melancholy is a little more hopeful and hope is tormenting, of course.

20:03 Wes: Delusionally hopeful.

20:03 Unknown speaker: Yeah, delusionally hopeful. You know what I mean? But the torment is not the triumph of hope or whatever, the audacity of hope. It's more like the torment of hope. So that is the mourner's experience, I think, as opposed to. We'll discuss the melancholics experience in more detail. But just so listeners can place themselves and think about mourning and the quality of mourning and how much hard work it is to get up in the middle of that street after you've sat down and all your energy is drained and you get up and get to the end of the street. It's a real something in life. And so it just takes time. Almost as if all these significant experiences have to be touched again.

20:40 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

20:42 Unknown speaker: In the absence of the object.

And I think even before that, just even doing the reality testing, as Freud recalls it, there's this seven stages of grief model. I don't even know what the seven stages are, but I think the. I think the first one is, are

you sure there's seven? The seven fishes. The seven.

21:03 Wes: Yeah.

21:03 Unknown speaker: You know, I think, you know, another person thinks there's five. I'm sure another person think there's more. But, you know, the first one, I believe, is denial. Right. So even acknowledging the reality of the loss is difficult. But I think you're also saying, Tracy, that it's also relieving to know what you've lost and you can go back into the world without them. Right.

Then the melancholic is stuck in what, rage or anger. Isn't that Kubler Ross?

I think it's like all seven at once. Yeah, because they're definitely denying it, too.

We're denying an enraged.

21:36 Wes: Yeah, in a way, it's a way of transforming memory so that it's no longer pregnant with the expectation of possible return. I think that's the way I think of this. If I'm seeing family members every once in a while on vacation, for me, they're spread out across the country. There's always a placeholder. So my memories, I function, my relationship to them, unless I'm calling them or with them at various points involves memory and. And built into those memories, implicit in them is this expectation. Well, I can always return to that. And there's something really strange about sort of desaturating memories, let's say, so that they no longer include that.

It's weird to call it reality testing, I think because it's not like we can go for those of us who have experienced loss and actually seen a loved one's dead body. That's not exactly the reality testing we're talking about because it's just a body. And that feeling that it's impossible for another human subject to go away because their existence is sort of this ineffable, hard to define thing in the first place. It's not merely some physical thing you can point to in the world. It's a weird kind of reality testing in which involves one simply sort of going through one's memories like old photographs.

I can't go out into the world and find definitive evidence that this person is gone. And so in a way, I think it's something very active. It requires a kind of leap of faith and we can talk about why someone would want to take that leap of faith later on. I think Freud speaks to this. That's the way I think of it. It's this weird sort of faith based reality testing. And that's why I find it so fascinating that Freud calls it that sort

23:17 Unknown speaker: of a bold or bald faced term for something that you just described. And it's palpable. Like reality testing is like back to science.

23:26 Wes: Yeah.

23:27 Unknown speaker: You know, and it's like it's not quite science when you realize like there will be no further recrudescence. You know what I mean, with this person? No. As you say saturation or it's like de recrudescence. It's like we're not gonna laugh about this ever again. We're not gonna make that special thing, you know, that special recipe we loved ever again. We're not gonna build another layer.

23:48 Wes: It's not a testable hypothesis. It's a generalization which is not really testable because just because they' today doesn't mean they couldn't be tomorrow. They might show up. Why not? At some fundamental level, that's why I call it a leap of faith to say, yes, this person actually really is gone. And I revisit these memories. I'm just trying to get at the sense in which each memory represents this Sort of tendril, the sort of line that's connecting us. We're connected to each one of them and we have to cut them bit by bit. Which is not to say no longer have the memories. Get rid of the memories or repress them or something like that, but like I said, refashion them so they no longer include that expectation of return.

24:32 Unknown speaker: So let's see, where are we in the paper?

24:34 Wes: So, yeah, we could turn to mourning. I mean, to melancholia, I guess. You know, I wanted to set up that more like complete picture of what it means to mourn so that I think the melancholia part will now make much more, much more sense.

24:48 Unknown speaker: But now we'll get more melancholic.

24:53 Wes: We have hypercathected the concept of. So that we can let it go,

24:58 Unknown speaker: let it go and go into our melancholic state. Does anybody want to begin with maybe

the diminishment in self regard? That's what Freud says is the main distinguishment. Sure, Wes already read the paragraph where Freud kind of lists the symptoms of melancholia. Maybe that is worth repeating again.

The impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world. This is a very famous line, famous in my world anyway. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty. In melancholia it is the ego itself. And so we see in a person who's melancholic. The image I get when someone is in a melancholic state is as if they are devouring themselves. They're eating themselves alive and weakening themselves. Working hard, but not working in the direction of mourning, which is, I think, toward freedom. And melancholic is working not necessarily.

It won't necessarily lead them to any freedom, but in fact can be further binding as they chip away more and more and more of themselves in an attempt to stay both. As Freud says, you have a relationship to this object and you're also secretly complaining about this object that you've lost by where does he say that? It's the plaints when you discover that it's not themselves they're actually complaining about or lambasting, but in fact they're taking the object that's disappeared from their lives and saying terrible things about themselves. But really that aggression that's directed against the melancholic's ego is about their feelings toward the lost object.

So that's a doozy and a defense against sort of those feelings of aggression, or as we would say in modern analysis, the aggression turned against the self, which diminishes and impoverishes the ego.

26:48 Wes: Freud is going to describe here the concept of identification, which will become increasingly important. And he's going to sort of hint at the existence of something called the superego, which some years later he's going to write about explicitly. I think it's 1924 in the ego and the id where he first starts using it. But it's a really fascinating theory, which is that the melancholic. And by the way, he prefaces this by saying that again. And Tracy, you alluded to this in the beginning. The melancholic is failing to mourn and they've lost a loved object.

But it's not necessarily literally the death of a loved one. It could just be rejection. It could be disappointment with a person. It could be really, really small, subtle things which in a way require us to mourn them, but for various reasons we might not. And he says that basically the melancholic can consciously perceive what they've lost. He uses this great phrase, he knows whom he has lost, but not what he has lost in him.

27:50 Unknown speaker: And it's unclear if he's referring to. When he says in him, is he referring to what he has lost in himself as the melancholic or lost in the object that he's apparently lost?

28:01 Wes: That's a good point. I always assumed it's what he's lost in the object, but yeah, that's an interesting ambiguity.

28:07 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think so too, ultimately.

28:09 Wes: So he's going to go on to describe some of the key features of the melancholia, which is all this self hatred and self berating and especially this sense of moral inferiority. And he's puzzled about why that happens. And then he's going to give us his theory of why that happens, which is that there is an identification. We sort of shift our libido. Ironically, in the melancholic, it's the libido is actually abruptly withdrawn from the object and it's placed onto the ego in the service of identification. So the ego sort of becomes a stand in a substitute for the object where we can direct our. Where we can direct our libido.

28:56 Unknown speaker: Right. And that identification becomes sort of the weakest way of being with another person. You are like me, I am like you. In fact, the object is not seen as different and unique, but there's a collapse. Right. He draws a difference between narcissistic identification and hysterical identification. And that narcissistic identification, I think he says that the hysteric has actually has lost an object. But the object cathexis is entirely abandoned for the narcissist versus in identification versus hysterical identification. The object cathexis is maintained.

So it's an utter like throwing away of the cathexis to this object. But you know, when you make an identification with someone, it's like, oh, you think about identity politics. I'm like you. But it's like, you know, that's really not. There's not a lot of depth there necessarily in likeness, but it's a loss of something that's needed, that likeness as well. Which I think brings us back to a little bit of what he's writing about on narcissism.

30:00 Wes: Well, let's. Yeah, let me read here a little bit. This is on page 249, around the middle. And this is sort of the crux of the meat of his theory about what's going on here. He says. So actually, I'll go a little bit above. It starts with at the very bottom of 248. There is no difficulty in reconstructing this process, what he calls the work of melancholia, as opposed to the work of mourning. An object choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed then owing to a real slight or disappointment. And by the way, this is something interesting which I hadn't noticed really focused on until now, this idea that it could be a slight that that produces the state, not just a disappointment, as in a narcissistic injury.

But we'll get into that. So owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of withdrawal of the libido from this object and displacement of it onto a new one, but something different for whose coming about various conditions seem to be necessary. The object cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end, by the way, and Freud thinks this is very strange, it should have a lot of resistance. But the free libido was not displaced onto another object.

It was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. And then here this famous wonderful line. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged as by a special agency which will later become the superego, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way, an object loss was transformed into an ego loss. And the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.

This doesn't tell us yet why this leads to self berating. We'll get to that. But did you guys have anything more to say about that? This incredible scientific discovery that he's making right now?

32:12 Unknown speaker: I just wanted to know why we didn't have any music in the background. Something very, very dramatic or operatic when you were reading, the shadow of the object fell upon the ego. I always feel like it should be like, dun, dun, dun, dun. Here it is.

32:26 Wes: Exactly.

32:27 Unknown speaker: The language is interesting. Like the object relationship was shattered. Then you identify with the abandoned object. This person in the external world or whatever it was that kind of triggered the melancholic work seemed to be some stand in or it seemed to represent something really important to the subject.

32:46 Wes: This use of the word shattered is really important because he's trying to get at this sense in which there's this odd severing. The mourner holds on the person who has died or disappointed them. The paradigmatic case, the easier case is one of death, they're gone. Or something. In the case of disappointment, something we idealized about them, thought we liked about them, that's gone. But we hold on, the mourner holds on. If it's still a living person, you hold on to the relationship and you say, okay, yep, I am going to give up that facet of my idealization.

And if they're dead, you gradually go through this process where you decaffect these memories. As we've talked about, there's a sense in which the melancholic actually is both. As we shall see on a conscious level, they are just abruptly letting go. They're abruptly cutting off the object. On an unconscious level, they will remain attached by way of the ego. They abruptly cut off the object, but they immediately, through identification, they replace it with the ego. And then they proceed to have this relationship to themselves, which is a sort of drama.

It's a dramatization of their relationship to the object.

34:01 Unknown speaker: Right, the old they're dead to me.

Exactly.

And suddenly the patient comes in, says, well, you know, I mean, we're not together anymore. He's dead to me. And then lapses in the next number of weeks into the self beratement. And you wonder like, well, okay, where is this coming from? This person is dead to you. You're over it. And then something else emerges.

34:27 Wes: Yeah, I had in my notes, you don't so much lose someone as you fire them. Which by the way, is why the Apprentice was such a great show for Trump, where you the whole idea of being able to fire people or to kick people or keep people out of one's country, all of that stuff, is sort of the perfect description of what it means to be a narcissist and to, on the one hand, get rid of, but on the other hand, to keep this ideal by way of an idealized self, let's say.

34:58 Unknown speaker: But as soon as the object stops fulfilling this very kind of specific function that it needed to fulfill for the subject, it's gone. Gone to him.

35:07 Wes: Yeah, you're out of here.

35:08 Unknown speaker: You're out of here. You're not telling me that you're like me anymore. You're done.

Exactly.

That you like me and you're like me.

Okay. That's all you get. Again. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to become a Partially Examined Life citizen and get access to the full version of this recording as well as all the other subtext recordings and much more. Thank you for your support of an interest in the Partially Examined Life and our other various spin off projects later.