Monsters and Melancholics

In his 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud identified two kinds of loss. First, there’s mourning, the “reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one,” a fixed process with a discernible end. But the second kind, melancholia, is marked by a refusal to move beyond the site of mourning. Melancholics, according to Freud, are of “a pathological disposition” dwelling in rampant contradiction. The melancholic refuses to move; she clings to habits, repeats cycles, and circles memories until, eventually, the lost object fades into the background. Giorgio Agamben’s gloss on melancholia was that “not only is it unclear what object has been lost, it is uncertain that one can speak of a loss at all.”