Melancholia for Martí

Abstract

Clearly playing on a metaphor of a socially constructed domain of power, Sigmund Freud’s reference to conscience as “among the major institutions of the ego” (Freud 1974, 243) suggests not only that conscience is instituted, produced, and maintained within a larger polity and its organizations but that the ego and its various parts are also accessible through a metaphorical language that attributes a social content and structure to these presumably psychic phenomena. Although Freud begins his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” by insisting on the indisputably “psychogenic nature” (Freud 1974, 243) of the melancholia and mourning under consideration in the essay, he also provides social metaphors that not only govern the topographic descriptions of melancholy’s operation but also implicitly undo his own claim to provide a specifically psycho genic explanation of these psychic states (Butler 1997, 178).