Freud's essay on mourning changed how we understand grief

Person: Sigmund Freud
Lived: 1856–1939
Field: Psychology
From: Austrian

The story

By the time of the First World War, Sigmund Freud had spent two decades developing psychoanalysis in Vienna. The war brought loss on an unprecedented scale, as grief touched almost every family in Europe, and Freud turned to the question of what happens in the mind when people lose someone or something they love.

In the essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (Trauer und Melancholie), published in 1917, he compared two responses to loss. Mourning, he argued, is painful but an inevitable and healthy part of life. The mourner knows what has been lost, and over time the mind gradually withdraws its attachment from the lost person, a process that takes place in conscious awareness. Melancholia, his term for what would now be called depression, looks similar but is pathological. The sufferer cannot fully identify what has been lost, so the grief works on in the unconscious mind.

Freud's key insight concerned ambivalence. In melancholia, he suggested, mixed feelings of love and hostility toward the lost person prevent the normal process of letting go. Instead the conflicted feelings turn inward, against the self, which helps explain the harsh self-reproach that often marks depression. He warned that in extreme cases these feelings could lead to suicide.

The essay belongs to a group of papers Freud wrote on the theory of the mind during the war years, and it shaped later psychoanalytic thinking about how people internalise those they have lost. Some writers have since argued that his account of mourning does not match current models of grief.

Still, the essay's central ideas have proved durable: that grief is work the mind must do over time and that depression can involve anger turned against the self. They remain influential in psychiatry and psychotherapy, and in the everyday language people use to talk about loss, more than a century after Freud wrote them.