In a significant essay entitled “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud wrote of “the work of mourning,” meaning the psychic process whereby a cherished object is finally laid to rest, as it were buried in the unconscious, and the ego liberated from its grip. Until the work of mourning has been accomplished, Freud argued, new life, new loves, new engagement with the world are all difficult if not impossible. This is the explanation, as he saw it, of the state that used to be known as melancholia—a kind of willed helplessness in which the dead lie unburied on the surface of consciousness, greeting every bid for freedom with a blank, joyless stare.
