Extract
[...] He must so that melancholy constitutes a subset of the 'manico-depressive' for the explanation of Abraham 'to hold', or to individualize the 'original' sadism as Klein will do. In both cases, the question of melancholy is crucial. The causality of violence being the 'infirmité' initial real or supposed, the mechanism of the inhibition of the drive remains repression. The libido is then itself transformed in hate, as Abraham takes the example in the character of Richard III. An obsessive mechanism thus grafts itself, in the background, on a persecutory mechanism, restoring the 'profile' of a 'psychoneurosis' or a mixed entity113. [...]
[...] Young girls, notes Freud, are 'generally healthy and not neurasthenic'58. The corresponding neurosis derives, in the married woman, from that of man, and, 'almost always mixed with hysteria, then constitutes the ordinary complex neurosis of women'59. It seems that, up to then, Freud dismisses or suspends the melancholic hypothesis (so important in the literary field of the time) in favor of the precise entities, even mixed, of hysteria and current neuroses. The texts prior to 1894 are a 'anthology piece': thus, 'the neurasthenic makes his wife more hysterical [hysteria then follows the 'retention of excitement' in women] than neurasthenic'. [...]
[...] The image at the most confused point of the entity - which drags between 'somatism' and 'mentalism' - can be illustrated, still at 'the golden age', almost at maturity however4, of psychiatry, by this report of Annales médico-psychologiques of 1846: « A 17-year-old woman, not menstruating, of a nervous temperament, affected by melancholy following moral suffering, had been subjected without success, for more than two months, to purgatives, antiphlogistics and nervines5. We read, in the same source, that the author of a Erotic History of Psychoanalysis would have discovered, not without astonishment, the curative sensitivity of the 'severely depressed' - the common name of melancholics today - to . BDSM games6. Following this lead, we would be sent, from the psychosis or the traditional borderline state of the 'maniac-depressive' . to perversion, a lead that we could not neglect. [...]
[...] Finally, the obsessive neurosis 'excorpore' in relation to a true object, but always partial, an Object from which hysteria, on the other hand, excludes the Phallus, this 'third' that introduces to the Lacanian modeling of the entire clinic. Hysteria and obsession thus constitute what can be called 'object neuroses'. The Ego is 'relieved' of the incorporation - painful in melancholy, of which Freud highlighted the resemblance with the 'obsessive', but, no more than in hysteria, 'genital but' 'phallic', 'authentically' object. [...]
[...] It follows the Complement to the theory of dreams, mentioned in the opening as "normal model of narcissistic psychic disorders"103. Freud uses this last word from 1910 - he then questions the suicide "incomprehensible without reference to affects" unknown of mourning and melancholy104- citing "by intermediate author" (Näcke) Havelock Ellis, who aims just as much, under the term "narcissism", the"auto-eroticism. In fact, in 1907, Freud defined suicide as "the apogee of negative auto-eroticism""105 and, as Laplanche and Pontalis have shown106, will have to "erase" the division into stages, admitted in 1911, between auto-eroticism and narcissism." It remains that mourning rests, in the present text, on an affect normal, in the same way as the state of being in love107, while melancholy -like perhaps erotomania- is pathological. [...]
