In Melancholia

Late last summer, far past time for bed, I walked through my apartment turning off all the lights. I’d done my nightly rituals. All day, the heat had been bearing down. I’d spent a few hours in the park and left sunstruck. Most of the evening I’d been alone, preparing boxes and lists for an impending move the following week into the first apartment I’d share with my boyfriend.

Back in my room. On my bedside table, my phone lit up. Two missed calls from C, my ex. I hesitated. With the upcoming move, the timing couldn’t have been more uncanny. To enter into the gates of the future, you are always required to glimpse over your shoulder into the past, just to remember what you are leaving behind.

I held my phone in my hand, an archive of my past relationship, and the only object capable of bringing C close to me again. Six years of texts, photos, call logs, and jointly-written notes app poetry. I stood in my room, unsure what to do.

We’d been broken up for over three years. The last time we had spoken was when I told him we couldn’t talk anymore. I struggled to remember the timeline. Was that true? Is it ever true that you stop speaking to someone you loved, even if you aren’t literally communicating? Are there remnants that get telepathically slung through spacetime that you can never quite account for?

Another call came through from him. My thumb hovered for the smallest second that seemed to last for the many years of our relationship. This time I answered.

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In Sigmund Freud’s 1917 paper “Mourning and Melancholia,” the psychoanalyst draws a distinction between the two titular psychic states, focusing mostly on the pathological symptoms of the latter. Mourning doesn’t last——it is a temporary and healthy response to the loss of a loved one. Melancholy, on the other hand, becomes persistent when a subject remains fixated on the love object long after it is lost. Whether the object is deceased, or the subject has simply become disillusioned with it, what is important is that the subject can’t move forward. The melancholy begins with an over-identification (what Freud labels as “narcissistic”) with the lost object, so that the melancholic doesn’t have to let go. Freud writes that the subject “knows what he has lost, but not what he has lost in [the object].” Then this identification shifts into ambivalence. That ambivalence turns inward, until the melancholic begins to hate themself rather than the loved one who has abandoned them.

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I don’t know why I picked up the call last summer. Maybe it was the heatstroke. Maybe it was just curiosity, or I had willed the call. Whatever the case, I experienced the strange and surreal feeling of talking to someone who, for all intents and purposes, has ceased to exist.

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In the last year of our relationship, C’s mother passed away after a decade plus battle with a terminal illness. He fell apart completely.

The months following are difficult to remember. Even now, I wonder what my mind is protecting me from by repressing certain details. More and more fights exposed the fragility of our relationship. His nights spent drinking grew frequent. With each passing month of that first year following his mother’s death, the changes I saw in him were oceanic.

After I graduated from my master’s, I moved from Iowa to his state because he promised it would help him get better. Somehow, I believed I had that kind of power. Or at the very least, that the sheer history of our love did.

We spent five months in his cramped apartment, books stacked knee deep and threatening to topple over. One social disaster after another ensued. Friends were uncomfortable, pulling me aside to ask what was going on. Medication didn’t put a dent in his depression, and therapy barely scratched the itch. Loved ones staged and quickly abandoned interventions. No one in his family had the time to clean up his messes, so I got good at scrubbing on my hands and knees. Every day I waited for him to wake up and be the person I had met in poetry class when we were twenty. Instead, he would emerge past noon most days, disheveled and the same as before he’d fallen fitfully asleep.

I knew then that this was something different than mourning. I could recognize in him a loss that extended far beyond the actual absence of his mother. He mourned for a future he would not have with her. He turned to me to carry him into that future. But his attachment to me quickly became ambivalent. At times, I was the one thing keeping him from the razor’s edge. At others, I was the dull blade itself. In the end, our history, several apartments, countless collaborative poems, hours driven, and three cats, weren’t enough to keep us together. Four years ago, on an overcast Monday morning in May, I packed my things and made my way to New York.

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Freud writes, “If the love for the object——a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up——takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. [...] In both disorders the patients usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their illness [...]”

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There are only flashes of arguments I can remember now, but I still hold so much guilt. He accused me of hating him while he was still in mourning. I would respond that he hated himself first, and in turn, me. I tried to hurt him back in my powerlessness. Still, I worried about how this hatred would manifest into irreparable harm, psychic or physical. I feared he wouldn’t make it out of the pain that had levelled him in the months since her death. I hadn’t realized that, all the time I was losing him, I had started to turn against myself.

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I began going to psychoanalysis, partly out of a feeling that’s referenced in “Mourning and Melancholia:” “In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself.” After we broke up, I wanted to move on as quickly as possible. I suppressed the desire to mourn, because I didn’t want to lose more time.

Early on in analysis, I resembled the melancholic. Many of the accusations I levied against myself were faults I had found in C during his melancholy. Unmotivated, stuck, uninspired, clingy, dependent, self-destructive, hiding from my own feelings, inflicting my hurt on others.

By that point, I was, more than two years into a loving relationship, with someone whose life was comfortably full of friends, a robust artistic practice, ambition, and sobriety. Even so, there were moments I found myself mirroring C. I was afraid that any time I drank, my new boyfriend would see me the way I saw C when he drank. Did I, too, have a darker self that could emerge if I drank enough? Would my boyfriend come to be disgusted with me any time he saw me wander up to the bar to order a second drink? Who was I, after all, to judge C if I was the same as him?

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On the phone, C and I tried to catch up. I waited awkwardly for him to offer a reason to stay on the line. He sounded like he was about to cry when he told me how good it was to hear my voice. Finally, we returned to our typical cadence: extended pauses from him, my rushes to fill the silences. Still, I kept most information about my life tucked away for fear that saying the wrong thing would set off a chain reaction. Inevitably, I said the wrong thing anyway. Suddenly, he began to criticize my affect. I was again unfamiliar to him, and the temporary warmth between us went cold. It was time to go.

My heart ached, in a way I hadn’t experienced since those last months we were together. I longed for a future I wouldn’t have, where he and I could meet again and where the past hadn’t happened. Where we could be companions. Where I could have helped him. Instead, I was relegated to a cycle in which I wished my love had been enough to save him, while knowing that he alone held the power to do that.

“Wait,” C said. “Just one more minute. It will be a long time before we talk again. I’m not ready to let you go.”

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Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that “we describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield.’” A few months ago, something broke through my own protective shield, and I decided to start analysis. What began as curiosity has quickly become a preoccupation. The more I go, the more unravels. If my breakup was partly responsible, even unconsciously, for getting me into the consulting room, I’m glad for it.

Some analysis sessions feel less like a reward than a self-inflicted punishment. It is hard to look at myself unflinchingly, to dredge up what has happened, not in order to heal my trauma, but like Avgi Saketopoulou writes, to “[relinquish] the idea that trauma can be repaired.” This different approach “opens paths to thinking about what subjects do with their trauma.” This is encouraging, taking the emphasis off healing and locating that energy elsewhere. This is work worth beginning again and again. To paraphrase Saketopoulou, making my trauma inert prohibits me from living my life on my own terms.

My analyst says that there are two versions of my ex: the internal C and the external C. I have omnipotence over the internal C. He is an image and emotion, but he is not him. The internal C, in actuality, is the way I feel about myself. My blame toward him, my frustrations about how he wouldn’t let me go, how I repeatedly punished him for breaking what was between us. My own guilt for abandoning him——all of this was only a projection.

What did you lose? My analyst asked me in a recent session.

Back then?

Yes, she said.

Not him, I said. It was more the trust I believed I could have in someone. The belief that my twenties were a safe harbor. That I was safe. When we broke up, I missed him, but not as much as I missed feeling secure. It was the container of a relationship, not its contents. Not him.

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Analysis is helping me see the difference between the internal and the external. This slow reconfiguring of the object has been part of my work in the consulting room. I’m not done yet. Before analysis, I had been identifying with what I had lost in C, fearing that the more I held onto him, the greater the chances were that I had the same ability to destroy my current relationship. In this way, I was able to keep him close. The object remained intact, and I could continue to punish it as a way to punish myself. As Freud writes, “The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation needs not be given up."

Although consciously there was nothing I wanted more than to let him go, for a long time, I wasn’t ready to stop hurting myself. I was the melancholic without even realizing. Now, I know it’s time to stop mourning. Or, at the very least, it’s time to stop punishing myself.

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Just days ago, after analysis during which I’d been talking about writing this essay, I was sure that when I left the office I would run into C on the street. It was four years to the day since I’d left him. I tried to shake off the sense that he was just around the corner. He wasn’t. I headed off to hang out with a friend.

We met up at a bar in her neighborhood, an area of Brooklyn where I don’t often go. We’d been lavished with the first true night of summer, and the time we spent together was getting my mind off my session. The night wound down, so we headed inside.

As I went to close out my tab, I felt a gust of air from the force of the door opening. I turned just for a moment, a half smile on my face. There C stood, frozen in place, in time. Immediately he turned and walked back out the door, as if he were a tape being rewound. I wandered over to my friend in a daze. I found it hard to breathe, but I wasn’t hyperventilating. It was more like I couldn’t exhale enough. Had I summoned C? Had I wanted to see him just like I had wanted to talk to him on the phone?

The external C goes on existing beyond my memories, holding a whole world of feelings and thoughts I’ll never be able to access, even as the internal C continues living inside me. Maybe he showed up that night because the self needs to be reminded that the stories it creates are just that——stories. It could have been a coincidence. Or, as my analyst often says, it could be both.

That night, I walked back out onto the street. My friend guided me to the idling car that would take me home. A gentle wind brushed the trees, the heat finally broke, but nothing changed. I returned to my apartment to find myself still alone. I realized I was waiting for another call to come that never would. I lay down and soon fell asleep. I dreamed of nothing.