In conversation: Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915–1918)^*

* Translated by Bettina Mathes.

ABSTRACT

This article concentrates on Freud’s draft of “Mourning and Melancholia,” written in 1915 and published in 1996. After presenting a summary of the main theses of Freud’s draft, Abraham’s and Ferenczi’s reactions to the text are discussed as well as Freud’s response to their comments. In addition to reviewing Freud’s partial adoption of Ferenczi’s introjection and his reluctance towards Abraham’s “mouth eroticism and sadism,” the article considers the question of whether and to what extent his disciples’ interjections—particularly Abraham’s approach—made their way into the final version of “Mourning and Melancholia.” The article closes by integrating the notion of narcissistic identification, which forms the core of Freud’s understanding of depression, and his study of the “preliminary stages of love,” written the same year, into a conceptualization of the narcissistic relationship between subject and object. Special attention is paid to the clinical relevance of the difference between narcissistic and libidinal object cathexis, which Freud had introduced.

In conversation: Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi on “Mourning and melancholia” (1915 – 1918). This article concentrates on Freud’s draft of "Mourning and melancholia”, written in 1915 and published in 1996. After presenting a summary of the main theses of Freud’s draft, Abraham’s and Ferenczi’s reactions to the text are discussed as well as Freud’s response to their comments. In addition to reviewing Freud’s partial adoption of Ferenczi’s introjection and his reluctance towards Abraham’s “mouth eroticism and sadism” the article considers the question whether and to what extent his disciples’ interjections — particularly Abraham’s approach — made their way into the final version of "Mourning and melancholia”. The article closes with integrating the notion of narcissistic identification, which forms the core of Freud’s understanding of depression, and his study of the “preliminary stages of love”, written the same year, into a conceptualization of the narcissistic relationship between subject and object. Special attention is paid to the clinical relevance of the difference between narcissistic and libidinal object cathexis, which Freud had introduced.

En conversation : Freud, Abraham et Ferenczi sur « Deuil et mélancolie » (1915–1918). Cet article est consacré au brouillon de « Deuil et mélancolie » de Freud, rédigé en 1915 et publié en 1996. Après avoir résumé les principales thèses de ce brouillon, l'auteure passe en revue les réactions d'Abraham et de Ferenczi à ce texte, ainsi que la réponse de Freud à leurs commentaires. Elle aborde la question de l'adoption partielle par Freud de la notion d'introjection élaborée par Ferenczi, ainsi que sa réticence envers « l'érotisme et le sadisme oral » d'Abraham, puis, dans un second temps, elle pose la question de savoir dans quelle mesure les interjections de ses disciples – en particulier l'approche d'Abraham – ont pu se frayer un chemin jusque dans la version finale de « Deuil et mélancolie », dont la conclusion intègre la notion d'identification narcissique - qui constitue le noyau de la compréhension freudienne de la dépression, comme de son étude des « stades préliminaires de l'amour » qu'il écrivit la même année – à une conceptualisation de la relation narcissique entre le sujet et l'objet. Une attention particulière est portée à la pertinence clinique de la différence entre investissement narcissique et investissement libidinal de l'objet, que Freud introduisit.

Freud, Abraham und Ferenczi im Gespräch über „Trauer und Melancholie“ (1915–1918). Freuds Entwurf von „Trauer und Melancholie“, verfasst 1915 und veröffentlicht 1996, steht im Zentrum der Untersuchung. Nach einer Zusammenfassung der Thesen des Entwurfs werden Ferenczis und Abrahams Reaktionen auf den Text sowie Freuds Kommentar zu ihren Stellungnahmen dargestellt. Freuds partielle Übernahme von Ferenczis Introjektion und seine Zurückhaltung gegenüber Abrahams „Munderotik und Sadismus“ werden erörtert sowie die Frage, ob und inwiefern die Einwürfe der Schüler in die Endfassung von „Trauer und Melancholie“ einflossen, insbesondere Abrahams theoretischer Ansatz. Abschließend wird der Begriff der narzisstischen Identifizierung, der den Kern von Freuds Verständnis der Depression bildet, mit seinen aus der gleichen Zeit stammenden Ausführungen über die „Vorstufen der Liebe“ zu einem Bild der narzisstischen Beziehung zwischen Subjekt und Objekt zusammengefügt, unter Betonung der klinischen Relevanz der von Freud entwickelten Differenz zwischen der narzisstischen und libidinösen Besetzung des Objekts.

Freud, Abraham e Ferenczi in conversazione su “Lutto e melanconia” (1915–1918). Il presente articolo si concentra sulla stesura preliminare di “Lutto e melanconia”, scritta da Freud nel 1915 e pubblicata poi nel 1996. Dopo un iniziale riassunto delle tesi principali esposte da Freud in questa sua prima versione, vengono discusse le reazioni di Abraham e Ferenczi al testo e quindi la risposta di Freud ai loro commenti. Oltre a esaminare la parziale adozione del concetto ferencziano di introiezione da parte di Freud e le riserve che quest’ultimo aveva invece rispetto all’idea di “erotismo e sadismo orale” di Abraham, si cercherà qui di valutare se e in quale misura i contributi dei due discepoli – e in particolare quello di Abraham – siano in qualche modo entrati a far parte della versione finale di “Lutto e melanconia”. L’articolo si chiude integrando l’idea di identificazione narcisistica, che è al centro della teoria di Freud sulla depressione, e il suo studio sugli “stadi preliminari dell’amore”, scritto nello stesso anno, entro una più ampia concettualizzazione della relazione narcisistica tra soggetto e oggetto. Particolare attenzione sarà dedicata a questo proposito all’importanza che in ambito clinico ha la distinzione, introdotta da Freud, tra un investimento oggettuale di tipo narcisistico e uno di tipo libidico.

En conversación: Freud, Abraham y Ferenczi sobre “Duelo y melancolía “ (1915–1918). Este artículo se concentra en el borrador de Freud de “Duelo y melancolía”, escrito en 1915 y publicado en 1996. Luego de presentar un resumen de las principales tesis de aquel borrador, la autora examina las reacciones de Abraham y Ferenczi a dicho texto, así como la respuesta de Freud a los comentarios de ambos. Además de revisar la adopción parcial de Freud de la idea de introyección de Ferenczi así como su reticencia al “erotismo bucal y sadismo” de Abraham, se considera la cuestión sobre si las intervenciones de sus discípulos —en particular el enfoque de Abraham— lograron ser incorporadas, y en qué medida, a la versión final de “Duelo y melancolía”. El artículo termina integrando la idea de identificación narcisista, que constituye el núcleo de cómo entiende Freud la depresión, y su estudio de “las etapas preliminares del amor”, escrito aquel mismo año, en una conceptualización de la relación entre sujeto y objeto. Se presta especial atención a la relevancia clínica de la diferencia entre catexis narcisista del objeto y catexis libidinal del objeto, introducidas por Freud.

KEYWORDS:

• “Mourning and Melancholia”
• theory of depression
• Ferenczi
• Abraham
• narcissistic identification
• orality

Acknowledgement

I thank Bettina Mathes who translated the manuscript and offered invaluable comments and queries.

Notes

* Translated by Bettina Mathes.

1 The Minutes of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Association (Nunberg and Federn 1962–1975) are abbreviated as Min. followed by the number of the volume. In order not to overly clutter the article with bibliographic references, a detailed chronology of events (including all sources) mentioned in this article can be downloaded from www.may-schroeter.de/index.php?i=188.

2 Exceptions are Lussier (2000, 678–682) and Falzeder and Haynal (2002, xxix).

3 F/Fer refers to Freud’s correspondence with Ferenczi (1993–2000), followed by the number of the volume; F/A refers to Freud’s correspondence with Abraham (2002).

4 At the end of 1914, Ferenczi wrote a paper on depression which, at the recommendation of Freud, was not published (F/Fer I, 561, 562).

5 Ferenczi made it quite clear that the concept of introjection was his idea (F/Fer I, 556).

6 Ferenczi spoke of projective and introjective processes which constituted the relation between the subject and external reality (1909, 41; 1913, 226–227); he did not, however, link them as tightly to the pleasure-unpleasure principle as Freud did.

7 See also Matte-Blanco (1941, 18–19).

8 Later (1921, 1923) Freud did find normal variants of narcissistic identification: primary identification (cf. Küchenhoff 1996; Eickhoff 2009) and the super-ego, which Küchenhoff has described as de-pathologizing the concept of identification (1996, 102).

9 Even though in Totem and Taboo Freud had already claimed a connection between identification and incorporation. As he saw it, the young men experience the devouring of the father in a magical way, as the result of an ego regression and as an appropriation of “a portion of his strength” (1912–13, 142).

10 Cf. Falzeder and Hermanns (2009, 29–31).

11 It is possible that Freud’s remarks on mania in the final version of “Mourning and Melancholia” are an indirect reference to Abraham. Freud argued that in mania it was not sadism that reappeared but the “liberation from the object which was the cause of [the depressive’s] suffering” (1916–17b, 255).

12 Perhaps Freud made a slip (anal instead of oral eroticism), or perhaps he mentioned the two elements because Abraham had described them as the driving forces of obsessional neurosis whereas Freud regarded the mechanism, i.e. regression of the ego, as all-important (Freud 1909, 1912–13, 1913).

13 The papers were published in the order in which they were written: first “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915a), then “Repression” (1915b), followed by “The Unconscious” (1915c), which was published in two installments.

14 The literature on “Mourning and Melancholia” is immense. Some of the most stimulating works are: Wisdom (1962), Meissner (1970–72), Compton (1985), Etchegoyen (1985), Widlocher (1985), Küchenhoff (1996), Ogden (2002), Lussier (2000), Zepf and Hartmann (2005), Eickhoff (2008), Quinodoz (2009, 2011, 256–260) and Dahl (2015).

15 The reason why Meyer-Palmedo and Fichtner (1999, 439) list “Mourning and Melancholia” as being published in 1916–17 is due to the fact that the publisher Heller used that year as the publication date for the fourth volume of the Internationale Zeitschrift. In addition, Heller indicated the publication date of every single one of the six issues that comprise the fourth volume on the cover of each issue: 1916 for issues 1 and 2, 1917 for issues 3, 4 and 5, 1918 for issue 6. “Mourning and Melancholia” was published in issue 6. Why Strachey (1957) gives 1917 as the publication date for “Mourning and Melancholia” is unclear.

16 Dahl argues that Freud, after a long period of hesitation, “integrated Abraham’s hypothesis of an oral-cannibalistic stage into his very own theory of oral eroticism” (2015, 224). According to Dahl, Freud adopted it from Abraham but “only as fictitious organization,” “not mentioning that he had the idea from Abraham” (ibid). I agree with Dahl that Freud was sceptical towards Abraham’s view. Unlike Dahl, I do not see any evidence that Abraham was the first to propose an oral-cannibalistic stage. What we do have evidence for is that Freud introduced the oral-cannibalistic stage in the autumn of 1914 in the third edition of Three Essays as well as in his case study of the Wolf Man, which was written at the same time. We also know for a fact that the third edition of Three Essays appeared in December 1914 and that Freud sent it to Abraham, who thanked Freud for it in January 1915 and read it in February (F/A, 295, 299). Moreover, for all we know, Abraham first presented his own theory, which focused on both oral eroticism and sadism, to Freud in his March 1915 letter, where he announced that he would write a paper on it (“The First Pregenital Stages”), on which he worked until the end of 1915. For more information on the prehistory of Abraham’s interest in orality, which dates back at least to 1913, and for more relevant data see May (2010, 2011) and chronology (fn.1).

17 Freud had assigned it a domineering role on the anal stage and he thought it to be a significant factor in the dynamics of depression. However, he attributed sadism to the anal-erotic-sadistic stage and not to the oral or narcissistic stage (1916–17b, 250–251). Even though the conflict of ambivalence was, “as it were, killing” the object (257), in Freud’s view the reverse mechanism was the more important dynamic, namely that the subject was held (or fantasized as being held) captive or being killed by the object.

18 Strachey (1957, 240) points to Freud’s concluding remarks in “Discussion on Suicide” (1910, 232). There is also his remark in the meeting of the Vienna Group in March 1909: “mourning is nothing but a natural melancholia” (Min. 2, 182).

19 To my knowledge, Freud never supplied the missing evidence; he went on to present his theory in The Introductory Lectures (1916–17a) and elsewhere without ever again mentioning its hypothetical nature.

20 Regarding Abraham’s internal state, see Bentinck (2013), whose biography I unfortunately could not consider for this publication.

21 While the entire Bericht has not been translated into English, differently worded and/or incomplete and much shorter versions of Ferenczi's (1920), Hitschmann's (1920) and Abraham's (1920) chapters were published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

22 As I have discussed elsewhere, a few years later Abraham (1924) insisted on it confidently, going as far as to propose an oral-sadistic stage that significantly differed from Freud’s oral-cannibalistic stage despite the similarity suggested by the choice of words (see May 2011).

23 As one reader of the manuscript rightly pointed out, this claim requires an explanation. In my opinion, what we are dealing with is an intrapsychic logic that is irrational insofar as it does not know of an object, i.e. of an other; there is a “one” but there is no “two.” This logic, it seems to me, can be found in the following works, all of them written or published in 1915. (1) In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes“ (1915a), Freud states that in the perversion of masochism the subject “is replaced by another, extraneous ego“ (132; German: 95), with the result that the ego “is” the object. (2) In “The Unconscious,” in a section where he presents the destiny of thing- and word-presentations in schizophrenia, Freud speaks of the “withdrawal of instinctual cathexis from the points which represent the unconscious presentation of the object,” i.e. the disappearance—not the repression!—of the unconscious thing-presentations (1915c, 203, emphasis in original; German: 161). When this is the case, the psychic apparatus contains the representation of the ego and the word-presentation of the object but not the (thing-)presentation of the object itself. (3) In “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease,” we read that in schizophrenic psychoses there is no distinction between subject and object; here too, the subject “is” the object (1915d, 269–270; German: 214). (4) In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1916–17b), written in 1915 as well, Freud describes the narcissistic identification in depression as “abandonment” of the libidinal object cathexis (250; the German word is “aufgelassen,” 204, meaning “given up,” “dropped”). Again, from the point of view of of the psychic apparatus there is no longer an object even though, seen from the outside and unknown to the subject, the subject is dominated by the object, which has become a part of the ego; this way the subject “is” the object. The above-mentioned passages are, I think, part of a logic of narcissism that characterizes psychotic and neurotic as well as normal psychic processes, which deepens and adds to insights that Freud had presented in “On Narcissism” (1914). In these preliminary explanations, the object, evidently, refers to an intrapsychic object and not to an “external” one, even though Freud does not always make a clear distinction between the two (Hämäläinen 2009).

24 Notably, Freud states that at this stage love could hardly be distinguished from hate “in its attitude towards the object” (1915a, 139). I believe that “attitude” is to be understood in opposition to “experiencing,” as something perceived from the outside, by an observer. Strachey translated “Verhalten” as attitude; behavior would have been the more accurate translation. In this same vein, I interpret Freud’s 1924 addition to the fourth edition of Three Essays in which he states that in his libido theory Abraham described “attitudes towards the object” (1905, 198), and not, we should add, the experience of the object. Here too Freud speaks of the “behaviour towards the object (“Verhalten gegenüber dem Objekt”).