"Mourning and melancholia': The genesis of a text and of a concept

The author investigates the origins of 'Mourning and melancholia', which ha s been the standard work of psychoanalytic reference on mourning since its publication. She notes that the existence of this paper has always tended t o be taken for granted and that it is there fire important to identify the foundations on which Freud developed his conception of mourning, which seem ed to have remained almost unexamined in the literature. The internal and e xternal sources are discussed. the former are defined as biographical data, involving a correlation between the theme of mourning and Freud's own bere avements, as well as a possible causal link between these instances and his creative activity, while the latter comprise Fred's reading and his scient ific exchanges. the external sources may be subdivided into anthropological , religious (mainly Jewish), psychiatric and psychoanalytic sources. The au thor points out that in his essay Freud has far less to say about mourning than about melancholia and concludes that the new view of this founding tex t accurring from the consideration of all the above factors shows that Freu d was relatively uninterested in the normal model of mourning, especially w hen compared with all hat flowed from his work on dreams.