Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”
This chapter on melancholy/melancholia addresses the use of these categories over the last 30 years in the analysis of cultural difference associated with race, gender, and sexuality. In particular, I will address the different trajectories that emerge in relation to Sandor Ferenczi’s categories of introjection and incorporation and their relationship to mourning and melancholia. In analyzing the distinctive analyses that are taken up by Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, David Eng, and David Kazanjian, on the one hand, and that of Freud, Abraham and Torok, Jacques Derrida, Anne Cheng, and myself, on the other, I will consider how these works have implications for the concept of difference in psychoanalysis. I will also address the manner in which works in Afropessimism address melancholia in a way that expands this concept of difference to the nonhuman, emergence of the idea of the human, and psychoanalysis’ relation to the nonhuman.
