melancholia

[pylduck]

In "Mourning and Melancholia," Sigmund Freud makes a distinction between mourning and melancholy as ways of dealing with loss. Mourning is an appropriate, "normal" reaction to loss (i.e., death of a loved one). Melancholy is an extreme state reached when the ego cannot escape from loss, incorporating that loss into oneself. Melancholia is a cannibalistic state wherein one's sense of self becomes intertwined with the idea or memory of the lost and it eats away at and incapacitates the self.