In short paper entitled ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ (1917). later translated as ‘Mourning and Melancholie’ (1925), Freud, Anna set out to try to account for the different psychological work carried out by these mental states. It is doubtless no coincidence that he should turn his attention to this topic at the height of the First World War, when the newspapers daily published long lists of soldiers killed in action. In linking mourning and melancholia Freud proposed to show that melancholia is a pathological form of mourning, which he describes as a normal affect. He defines mourning as a reaction to the loss of a loved one (human or non-human) or the loss of an abstract thing such as a country, ideal, or one’s freedom. Although its affects may be severe, Freud notes, we never regard it as pathological and expect it to be overcome after a suitable period of time. By contrast, melancholia is to be regarded as pathological, even though it may have the precise same cause, e.g. loss of a loved one or thing. Melancholia is characterized by a profoundly painful sense of dejection, Freud says, which is accompanied by a loss of interest in the outside world, a loss of the capacity and feeling for love, a general lassitude, and a loss of self-regard. Mourners experience all of these symptoms, too, Freud says, with one key exception: the loss of self-regard. Freud describes the inner working of mourning as follows: once it is clear to the subject that their loved object no longer exists, they feel compelled to withdraw their liminality attachment to that object. But this demand---understandably---is met with resistance---we do not want to give up on our loved object. The opposition to this demand can be so strong that, rather than face up to the reality of our loss, we cling to the object in a hallucinated form, a process Freud describes as ‘wishful psychosis’. Eventually the ego is able to break free from this cycle of disbelief and make its peace with reality. Melancholia has a similar inner working, but differs in that the actual cause of it may not be fully known by the subject: it is usually triggered by a feeling of loss, but it is not always clear to the subject what exactly it is that they have lost. The loss is unconscious in this case, whereas for mourning the loss is always fully conscious. The effect too is quite different: for the mourner, the world feels empty in the absence of their loved object, while, for the melancholic, it is their ego---their inner world---that feels empty; hence the powerful feeling of self-reproach that attaches to melancholia. Today we would recognize Freud’s portrayal of melancholia as a reasonably standard account of depression. Freud returned to this topic in his paper ‘Das Ich und das Es’ (1923) translated as ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1927). For Freud, the real interest in thinking about melancholia is the way it makes apparent the way the ego can take itself as an object---this idea is central to narcissism as well. It is thus central to his thinking with regard to the formation of the psychical agencies such as the ego and the id. Freud theorizes the work of melancholia as follows: an attachment to a loved object is shattered when that object resists or rejects that attachment (for example, a friend may slight us in some real or imagined way); but rather than withdraw the libido from that object and displace it onto a different object (as we would in mourning), we turn that libido back onto ourselves, with the result that the ego forms an identification with the spurned object. The lost object is duplicated on the inside, and the pain of loss is thereby avoided by the power of this internalized simulacrum. By the same token, the hatred we feel for ourselves---which according to Freud we actually enjoy---is a displaced form of hatred for the other who has rejected our attachment. Melancholics revenge themselves on their lost love objects via a process we would today label self-harm. For this reason, Freud also links anorexia to melancholia. Freud’s analysis of the metapsychology (his term) of mourning and melancholia has been very influential in critical theory, especially in the work of Benjamin, Walter and Butler, Judith. In her essay on Benjamin, ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978), Susan Sontag wrote that one cannot really understand his work until one grasps how deeply it relies on a theory of melancholy. In her view, his work reflected his character, which, she thought, evidenced profound melancholic traits. His writing on Proust, Kafka, and even Goethe and Walser all hinge, she argues, on the way their work dwells on melancholic topics, especially the emotions associated with forced solitude or, more particularly, the sense that one does not belong. Nowhere is the importance of melancholy to Benjamin’s thinking clearer than in his failed PhD thesis, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977). Benjamin argued that Trauerspiele (or ‘sorrow plays’, as Sontag translates them) are allegories of historical catastrophe turned in on themselves. In an early work, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler produced a striking rereading of Freud by linking mourning and melancholia to the Oedipus complex, arguing that melancholy is central to the development of homosexual identity. As Butler notes, the formation of the sexual identity, which for Freud means overcoming primary bisexuality, requires the subject to give up at least one object of their affection, namely the parent of the same sex. Freud’s assumption is that this turning away from the object of the same sex is natural, but Butler argues that it is more likely to be a product of the prohibition on same-sex relations that were current in Freud’s time and to a certain extent today. The heterosexual subject is therefore a product of prohibition, rather than the primary or default position. Meanwhile the homosexual subject, on this reading, is the product of the disavowed grief at the loss of the same-sex object and its subsequent internalization. As Butler notes, both Kristeva, Julia and Irigaray, Luce have devoted works to the topic of melancholy. Kristeva’s work, Soleil Noir: Dépression et mélancolie (1987), translated as Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1992), which draws on Klein, Melanie, is focused on motherhood, arguing that melancholy is the matricidal impulse turned against the self. Its affect is a kind of voluptuous sadness which in certain circumstances is desublimation to form art. For Irigaray, melancholia is the psychological norm for women in the Freudian universe because their character is supposedly defined by the ‘lost’ penis they never had. It is therefore a model of identity formation she rejects.