Alana Kelley

The Death Drive:

Melancholy and the Loss of the Love Object

The devotion to happiness which has been denied

is won only through a regretful sorrow.
Walter Benjamin1

Sigmund Freud introduces his theory of the death instinct in his 1920 publication
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud originates that The aim of all life is death If
we firmly maintain the exclusively conservative nature of instincts, we cannot arrive at
any other notions as to the origin and aim of life.2 With this concept he situates that the
animate life object (the individual) always desires to retract to a state of insentience.
Almost a decade later in Civilization and Its Discontents the initial premise of the death
drive progresses into a contextual series of self-destructive tendencies by the individual
and re-labels it as the death drive, instead of instinct, due to its assertion of
inessentiality to the organism. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud contextualizes
the death drive in many forms of self-inflicted suffering but one in particular to focus on
will be its application to love and the loss of the love-object,
I am, of course, speaking of the way of life which makes
love the centre of everythingwhich looks for all
satisfaction in loving and being loved. we are never so
defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so
helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object
1 Adorno, Theodor. Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p.230.
2 Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Group Psychology and Other Works),
The Standard Edition; Volume XVII (1920-1922), p. 38-39

or its love.3
Illuminating Freuds angle of networking between the death drive and the love-object is
his earlier work Mourning and Melancholia written in 1917 which probes the symptoms
of melancholy, as related to the loss of the love-object, and further accentuates
manifestations of the individuals self-destructive fervor based in the unconscious desire
towards death.
Addressing Freuds working definition of melancholy in his essay Mourning and
Melancholia, there are extreme parallels bridging the symptoms of melancholy, the static
state of its condition, and self-destructive tendencies in the death drive. Freud traverses
the field of melancholy first and foremost distinguishing its one crucial difference from
mourning which strongly supports the notion of self-destruction in the death drive,
Melancholia is mentally characterized by a profoundly
painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world,
the off of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of
performance and a reduction in the sense of self, expressed
in self-recrimination and self-directed insults, intensifying
into the delusory expectation of punishment bear in mind
that mourning displays the same traits, apart from one: the
disorder of self-esteem is absent.4
Though all traits mentioned are ushering factors shared between the death drive and
melancholy, the distinct trait that sets them apart, which is only present in melancholy, is
the debasement of the ego. There is a fused association between Freuds concepts of the
death drive and the administered degradation of the self.
In the case of melancholy the subject in question cannot consciously grasp what he
has lostso the thing is to relate melancholia to the loss of an object that is withdrawn

3 Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents; (1929), II, p.29

4 Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." A Freud Reader. Ed. Adam Phillips.
London: Penguin, 2006. p.311.

from consciousness, unlike mourning, in which no aspect of the loss in unconscious.5

Due to the loss of the love-object, the individual, in melancholia, is unable to pass over
into mourning because he/she cannot project this love onto a new object-choice, which is
a crucial step in merging out of melancholy and into the final stages of mourning and
acceptance. Because of this inability to accept the loss of the object, the individual
converts those feelings of loss on to his/her own ego, resulting in misdirected selfresentment.
The result of this was not the normal one of the withdrawal
of the libido from this object and its displacement on to a
new one but instead drawn back into the ego. It did not
find any application there, but served to produce an
identification of the ego with the abandoned objectThus
the loss of object had been transformed into a loss of
ego6

Advancing the relation between melancholia and the impaired ego are continuing
characteristics that reflect upon the notion of self-destruction through melancholys
hindmost and ultimate score of suicide. It is obvious as to the connections between the
most extreme consummation of melancholia and the death drive as suicide being the only
permanent and terminal limit. Though most cases of melancholia do not reach the
suicidal extreme, the symptomatic phases throughout this nature attribute to
characteristics of the death drive and affections towards self-destruction payable from the
depletion of the ego. Only in this extremity does the individual exceed the death drive
because the death drive indicates tendencies and motions towards an unconscious desire
to punish themselves and in the case of melancholia it is for guilt of losing the loveobject.
5 Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." A Freud Reader. Ed. Adam Phillips.
London: Penguin, 2006. p.312.
6 Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." A Freud Reader. Ed. Adam Phillips.
London: Penguin, 2006. p.316.

Considering that the percentage of suicidal melancholies occur minimally

highlights the persevering melancholic individual away from suicide in order to further
their experience of self-destructive urges. This then connects with Freuds insertion of
narcissism into the state of melancholia. The individual elongates the state of melancholy,
which directs itself towards the ego, leading to the conclusion that the decisive factor in
melancholy is essentially narcissistic and masochistic. Because the main element of
melancholia is the ego, Freud states that because the melancholic individual is unable to
project their love onto a new objet, it recoils back upon the ego, creating a narcissistic
objection.
This requires the object-choice to have occurred on a
narcissistic foundation, so that the object-investment, if it
encounters difficulties, is able to regress to narcissism. 7
Even though it is still authoritative that the ego is the subject of corruption in
melancholia, it still centers as the main contingent and focus because it is the cause of the
effect,
The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes
the substitute for the love-investmentThis substitution of
identification for object-love is a significant mechanism for
the narcissistic illness.8
The induction of melancholy is narcissistic because the initial chosen love-object stands
alone as subjective to the individual. Through the loss of this object, which subsisted
solely on the individuals choice, the ego is debased and shamed because its performance
in object-choice was unsuccessful.
The vain origination of the lost love-object guides the ego into a state of melancholia
building its substructure and emitting dispositions and susceptibility for the desire of self7 Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." A Freud Reader. Ed. Adam Phillips.
London: Penguin, 2006. p.316.
8 Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." A Freud Reader. Ed. Adam Phillips.
London: Penguin, 2006. p.316.

destruction and a drive towards an inanimate state of expiration towards death.