Mourning

Reflections on Mourning and Melancholia

For many years in my clinical practice, I have accompanied patients through various types of loss. I have witnessed diverse forms of mourning: from the end of a romantic relationship to the loss of objects with symbolic value; fires that leveled homes, illnesses that transformed bodies, layoffs that shook identities, partings that left silences, the deaths of loved ones—both human and animal—and even spontaneous or elective abortions.

Each loss carries its own unique pain; each person has their own particular way of inhabiting grief.

And although I have experienced losses throughout my life, I had never before faced a process as devastating as the passing of my father a few months ago. Nothing had prepared me for that wound. No theoretical framework, no prior professional experience.

Mourning is an intimate, deeply subjective, solitary, dynamic, and, at times, chaotic experience. There is no single way to navigate it. There are models that speak of stages—denial, anger, sadness, acceptance—but internal reality often refuses to follow that order. Sometimes the stages intertwine, other times they repeat, and occasionally, they simply do not arrive.

This process led me to reread a text I have always deeply valued: Mourning and Melancholia by Freud. In it, Freud clearly distinguishes between two ways of responding to loss. Mourning, according to him, is a painful but necessary process: a psychic task that involves saying goodbye to someone or something profoundly significant—a person, a life stage, a vocation, a belief, or even an identity. It is a work of disidentification and emotional realignment that forces us to redefine our internal world. It is uncomfortable, yes, but also transformative. It allows us to integrate what was lost and continue living. it makes us grow.

Melancholia, on the other hand, is a form of arrested mourning. It is not just the lost object that is grieved; a wound is inflicted upon one's own self-esteem. The ego turns against itself: it blames, devalues, and punishes itself. The loved object is internalized with ambiguity: loved and hated simultaneously, idealized and despised without respite. The result is a circular, corrosive sadness that does not allow for progress. And while this melancholia can appear inevitably, it is essential to recognize and work through it to transform it into an active mourning process.

Wilfred Bion taught us that only if we can remain for a time in the "not knowing"—in the uncertainty and the void left by loss—can something new emerge. To think, to process, is only possible when we do not flee from the pain. But the melancholic individual often cannot wait. They try to fill the void immediately, closing themselves off in certainties, acting instead of feeling. And that paralyzes the process.

Christopher Bollas, for his part, introduces the concept of the “transformational object”: that or someone who, having been deeply loved, leaves an internal trace that modifies us. True mourning involves more than just saying goodbye; it means allowing something of what was lost to transform us. But if we avoid mourning—if we cover it up with new relationships, new identities, or quick gratifications—we lose that opportunity for transformation. We remain trapped in a “false self”: functional, but empty.

As Bion rightly said, the point is not so much to “understand,” but to learn to endure. To endure the not knowing. To endure the time it takes to process a loss. To endure internal disorder without rushing to give it a name or a meaning. Only then can mourning fulfill its function: deconstructing us so that we may later reconfigure ourselves. Only then can we emerge from melancholia—not by escaping forward, but by inhabiting the psychic time necessary to feel alive inside once again.

Death is part of life, but it always unnerves us, transforms us, and confronts us with uncertainty, with our fragility, and with how little we can control. Even so, if we are capable of moving through grief and integrating it honestly into our lives, it can reveal itself as an opportunity: a gateway toward vitality, creativity, and passion. A painful path, yet a deeply human one.