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IN ONE OF HIS seminal insights, Freud linked the state of mourning to the condition of melancholia, which we would now call depression. The characteristics that mourning shared with depression include

a profoundly painful dejection, a cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment –

The singular difference is that in mourning ‘the lack of interest and turning away of activity’ common to depression has an exception when it comes to that connected with ‘thoughts of him’.

Both states are set in motion by loss.

In one of his understated asides, Freud notes, ‘It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude [in mourning] does not seem to us pathological.’ This is particularly the case if one considers that a clinging to the dead through the medium of a ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ can be part of mourning, too.

In his ‘Thoughts on War and Death’ written in 1915, very soon after Mourning and Melancholia, he elaborated the inevitable ambivalence that unwittingly characterizes all our loves:

These loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-relations a small portion of hostility.

This small portion of hostility can quite easily grow large in the dead partner with whom we in part identify, just as children identify with their parents, take them in, often enough later on only to spit them out. It is these very parts in the other that then turn back on us rampantly, like an avenging conscience, to persecute us into abjection once they have been lost. Have gone.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan talked about such cruel and vindictive self-persecution as the work of an ‘obscene super-ego’, the super-ego being in Freudian terms that internalized, endlessly repetitive, sadistic and rancorous conscience – initially shaped out of our parents’ prohibitions and cultural settlements on good and bad – that yaps away at us like a small-town bully, belittling us, turning us into a nether likeness of Hamlet, one without poetry. In a wonderful riff on self-criticism, the analyst Adam Phillips evokes a Hamlet whose dangerous desire for vengeful murder is converted into a form of character assassination – his own: ‘the character assassination of everyday life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character’.

The Hungarian-born Melanie Klein, so influential in understandings of psychoanalysis in Britain, thought of mourning as a reactivation of the inevitable early-childhood depression: the loss of the loved person, like the loss of internal ‘good objects’ in infancy, threatens a collapse. Mourning is thus a maddening process in which hatred, guilt and love oscillate until the ‘internal good objects’ can be reinstated and the dead person put to rest.

And all of this while we’re having a cup of coffee with a friend and talking about the weather. Stormy in these days of inner warming. Holding out hope, too, that those internal good objects come round.

Not that there’s a mother in sight anywhere.