Mourning and Melancholia

Mourning and Melancholia (German: Trauer und Melancholie) is a work of Sigmund Freud from the year 1917. In this essay, Freud postulates than mourning and melancholia are similar but different responses to loss. In mourning, a person deals with the grief of losing of a specific love object, and this process takes place in the conscious mind. In melancholia, a person grieves for a loss he is unable to fully comprehend or identify, and thus this process takes place in the unconscious mind. Mourning is considered a healthy and natural process of grieving a loss, while melancholia is considered pathological.

References

• Freud, Sigmund (1917). "Trauer und Melancholie" [Mourning and Melancholia]. Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse [International Journal for Medical Psychoanalysis] (in German) (Leipzig and Vienna: Hugo Heller) 4 (6): 288–301. Retrieved August 12, 2014. 
• Clewell, Tammy (March 2004). "Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis of Loss". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52 (1): 43–67. doi:10.1177/00030651040520010601. Retrieved August 12, 2014.