Analysis Of Freud's Mourning And Melancholia

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As Freud affirms in his text Mourning and Melancholia (1917) both processes become with a loss, but when the person is not able to go through a normal process of mourning, the person falls in the state of melancholia. Being mourning a «reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition.[...]In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches…show more content…
While mourning has a healthy resolution in which “[...]when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.» (Freud, 1917:245). This resolution does not take place in the process of melancholia, this could be due to the fact that in melancholia «[the] exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind.[...]one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost,» (Freud, 1997:245) . If we extrapolate Freud's idea to the Spanish situation, we could say that the Pact of Silence and The Pact of Forgetting may be the causes that do not let society finish the process of mourning in a healthy way. The lack of information and space to talk about what happened during the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship can and do obscure the real reasons behind the work of melancholia. To render justice to the dead and to break the silence about Spanish history is the first step to break with the state of…show more content…
The state of melancholia hides the real reason behind the fear to exhume these corpses. “The nease caused by these exhumations was palpable. A vow of silence- one that had been adhered to in the years since Franco dies- was being broken” (Tremlett, 2006: xvi). The mourning process could not take place then among the families of the dead people from the left-wing movement. What makes this process even harder, is the fact that the dead from the right-wing “[...] ere in holy ground. They were not in a ditch.” (Tremlett, 2006:xvii). There is also a problem with the recognizability of some deaths that took place during La Transición, this nonrecognition takes to oblivion the life and the struggle of these victims “Spaniards often forget, however, quite how violent it (the Transición) was. In the five years after Franco's death, more than a hundred demonstratos, left wing activists, students and separatists were killed by the police or the 'ultras', the far right. Many more were killed by ETA and other left-wing or separatist groups”. (Tremlett, 2006:75) This difference makes the wounds of the Civil War even more difficult to heal, and the ghosts of the victims acquire a new meaning. Their legacy is seen as a revolutionary one, the one that tried to stop a fascist dictatorship, their deaths have new meaning, the meaning of the revolution. The revolutionary ghosts haunts then Spain and brings memories of a
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