Melancholia describes a process
- an originally external object is lost (person, ideal)
- refusal to break the attachment to such an object or ideal
- leads to withdrawal of the object into the ego
- replacement of the object by the ego
- setting up of an inner world in which a critical agency is split off from the ego
- proceeds to take ego as its object
The accusations that the critical agency levels against the ego turn out to be very much like the accusations that the ego would have leveled against the object or the ideal.
Thus the ego absorbs both the love and rage against the object. Melancholia appears to be a process of internalization, and one might well read its effects as a psychic state that has effectively substituted itself for the world in which hit swells. The effect of melancholia, then, appears to be the loss of the social world, the substitution of psychic parts and antagonisms for external relations among social actors: “an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification” (Freud). 179-180
The ego is “altered by identification,” that is, altered by virtue of absorbing the object or pulling back its own cathexis onto itself. The ‘price” of such an identification, however, is that the ego splits into the critical agency and the ego as object of criticism and judgment. 180
Thus the relation to the object reappears “in” the ego, not merely as a mental event or singular representation, but as a scene of self-beratement the reconfigures the topography of the ego, a fantasy of internal partititon and judgment that comes to structure the representation of psychic life tout court. The ego now stands for the object, and the critical agency comes to represent the ego’s disowned rage, reified as a psychic agency separate from the ego itself. That rage, and the attachment it implies are “turned back upon” the ego, but from where? 180
… melancholia is not an asocial psychic state … melancholia is produced to the extent that the social world is eclipsed by the psychic, that a certain transfer of attachment from objects to ego takes place, not without a contamination of the psychic sphere by the social sphere that is abandoned.
In melancholia, not only is the loss of an other or an ideal lost to consciousness, but the social world in which such a loss became possible is also lost. The melancholic does not merely withdraw the lost object from consciousness, but withdraws into the psyche a configuration of the social world as well. … psychic life withdraws a social world into itself in an effort to annul the losses that world demands.
Thus, if the relation between melancholia and social life is to be reestablished, it is not to be measured by regarding the self-beratements of conscience as mimetic internalizations of the beratements leveled by social agencies of judgement or prohibition. Rather,
forms of social power emerge that regulate what losses will and will not be grieved; in the social foreclosure of grief we might find what fuels the internal violence of conscience. 183