Loss, Bereavement, Mourning, and Melancholia: A Conceptual Sketch, in Defence of Some Psychoanalytic Views

Abstract

Today, arguing in favor of the psychoanalytic view of depressive states is likely to be hopeless, not so much for epistemological reasons, but because most contemporary clinicians (including many psychodynamically-oriented therapists) have lost sight of the intuitions at the core of the Freudian and post-Freudian visions of mourning and bereavement. This paper, through a close reading of one of Henry James’s most praised short stories, almost a contemporary of Freud’s work on melancholia, offers a detour back to the origin of this misunderstanding. It is a plea for the aesthetic, philosophical, and anthropological re-education of therapists, upstream from the conceptual quandaries that have plagued an ill-founded refutation of psychoanalytic views on depression.

I am especially grateful to Louis A. Sass, who revised the first draft of this paper, and helped me to overcome my reluctance to write about psychoanalysis in English. I also thank Steeves Demazeux and Jerry Wakefield for their precious comments.