Melancholy Philosophy: Freud and Benjamin

In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholy”, Freud recognizes two mutually exclusive responses to loss — mourning [Trauer] and melancholia [Melancholie]. This sharp distinction between the two responses has long since become almost synonymous with the understanding of a normal versus a pathological reaction to loss, and the clear demarcation between them. At the outset of Freud’s article the two responses would seem closely related, but the question of the acceptance and acknowledgement of th...