The Relationship Between Depression, Mourning, and Melancholia
When we lose someone we love - whether through death, estrangement, or the slow unraveling of a relationship - something shifts inside of us. The world may appear unchanged, but inside, it’s as if the scaffolding that held us up has quietly collapsed. Or everything might feel like a blur, leaving us disoriented and confused. We grieve and withdraw, searching for words that we can’t find and for reasons that don’t exist. And sometimes, we don’t quite know why the sadness lingers longer than expected, or why it turns inward so sharply.
Sigmund Freud, in his 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, gave language to two different experiences of loss, distinct in the ways they impact our internal world. Mourning, he suggested, is a painful process following the loss of someone or something we loved or were attached to.
We may experience sadness, yearning, and longing but, as the reality of the loss settles, our mind, at its own pace, gradually comes to a place of acceptance. This process was understood by Freud as a redirecting of emotional energy, what he called libido, away from the lost object, so that it becomes available to engage with the world and with others.
But melancholia (related to present-day depression) is more elusive. In these cases, we may not even be fully aware of what has been lost. Even if there is an external loss to point out to, people may not know what has been lost within them, and the deep meaning of the loss remains unknown to our conscious mind. We may not know why we feel how we feel, or carry a persistent sense of emptiness and void.
Freud observed that many of the features of melancholia, such as sadness and emotional withdrawal, are similar to those of mourning. However, he noted an important difference: in melancholia, individuals experience self-reproach, guilt, and loss of self-regard. This resonates with the experiences of some of the depressed people I have worked with, who lived with a deep-seated sense of worthlessness or a relentless self-criticism that appeared to be immune to external reality or internal recognition.
The reason behind this self-debasing, Freud theorized, is that we turn against ourselves the pain and anger we hold towards the loss, and the ambivalent feelings we held (even if unconsciously) towards those we lost: our disappointment, hurt, anger, or hatred. Through this process, instead of letting go of the lost other, the mourner takes them in, unconsciously identifying with them. This identification allows us to keep the attachment to the lost object, to persist in our wishes for reparation or retribution, and to hold on to the hope that our longings for love will be fulfilled.
The impact of the loss on our sense of self and self-worth is the result of this internal turning, leading to a collapse of the self into the lost object; as Freud famously put it, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.” He describes the melancholic’s self-criticism as being strangely precise, as if the inner voice “knows” what it’s talking about. And indeed, it often does - because it’s not really the self speaking, but the internalized object: the person who was lost, or more accurately, the version of them we carried inside.
Loss involves not just a person “out there” in the world, but an internal object - a psychological presence built over time through repeated interactions. When someone dies, leaves, or hurts us, we mourn the relational world we had with them. And that world often included complexity: love, hope, resentment, longing, disappointment, and unmet needs.
If these ambivalent feelings remain unrecognized or unspoken - if we feel conflicted, ashamed, or guilty about of our emotions and experiences - we may find ourselves stuck. Instead of moving through the painful but freeing process of mourning, grief may fold inward, and the emotional energy we once directed toward the other becomes a private battleground. This inward focus is a common feature of depression.
How can therapy for depression and mourning help?
In psychodynamic work, we don’t rush to soothe or “fix” the pain, or see it as something to “get over” with. We don’t think of the core issues as defined by “distorted” or “wrong” thoughts or feelings. Freud’s ideas can help us consider that depression, particularly when accompanied by self-criticism and self-loathing, can be an expression of losses that have not been mourned. In this way, working through depression might involve the work of mourning.
Often, this process brings the past to the surface. It can involve reliving painful experiences and confronting internal conflicts and ambivalent feelings we may have worked hard to keep at bay. However, this process can help us understand the nature of our loss and the challenges in accepting it. This understanding emerges in the work with a therapist who can, along with the patient, offer a relationship through which people can begin to mourn not only the present loss but older, buried ones.
Therapy can also help untangle the knotted threads of identification. Sometimes, we hold on to someone we’ve lost by becoming like them—adopting their behaviors, mannerisms, even their suffering or shortcomings. As Freud suggested, this can be a way of keeping the object alive. But when the relationship was painful or conflicted, this kind of identification can perpetuate suffering.
Depression and mourning are not things to be “solved,” but working through them involves a process of reorganization. Freeing the ego from the shadow of the object, becoming our own person and being able to love and be loved, doesn’t mean forgetting or “letting go” in the way culture often demands. In fact, the goal isn’t to move on but to move with, by integrating what was meaningful about the relationship—its joys, wounds, and contradictions—into a fuller sense of self.
This is slow work, sometimes invisible, and always nonlinear. But in the presence of a therapist who isn’t afraid of sorrow, who can stay with the confusion and the silence, something begins to shift. The mourner begins to feel that their grief makes sense—not because it’s rational, but because it’s human. From that place of understanding and from the experience of being understood, the depressive fog may begin to lift. Not all at once, but enough to make space for something else - something new, or perhaps, something long-lost returning in a new form.
If you are interested in working with our therapists to better understand and work through experiences of mourning and depression, please feel free to contact us today.
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Photo credit: Mitchel Willem Jacob Anneveldt