On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

Thierry Bokanowski is a founding member and training and supervising analyst of the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris, and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). He is a former editor of 'La Revue francaise de Psychanalyse', former member of the IPA Publications Committee, former Scientific Secretary to the Institut de Paris, and currently chairs the Executive Committee of the Commission d'Enseignement de la Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. He has published several papers in various psychoanalytical journals, including the 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis'. His books include 'Sandor Ferenczi', and 'De la pratique analytique', translated under the title 'The Practice of Psychoanalysis'. Leticia Glocer Fiorini is a training psychoanalyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. She is the author of 'The Feminine and the Complex Thought', 'Deconstructing the Feminine: Psychoanalysis, Gender and Theories of Complexity', and editor of 'The Other in the Intersubjective Field' and 'Time, History and Structure. A Psychoanalytical Approach'. Among other contributions in psychoanalytic journals she has published 'The enigma of the sexual difference', in 'Feminine Scenarios"'; 'Assisted fertilization, new problems' in 'Prevention in Mental Health'; 'The sexed body and the real, its meaning in transsexualism' in 'Masculine Scenarios'; 'Psychoanalysis and Gender, Convergences and Divergences' in 'Psychoanalysis and Gender Relations'; and 'The bodies of present-day maternity' in 'Motherhood in the Twenty-first Century'. Sergio Lewkowicz is currently the Scientific Director of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytical Society; Psychiatry and Training and Supervising Analyst for the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytical Society; Publications Director of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytical Society; Professor and Supervisor for Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy in the Psychiatry Department, Medical School of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul; Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Publications Committee; Member of the Programme Committee of the 43rd Congress of the IPA in New Orleans (2004); former President of the Society of Psychiatry of Rio Grande do Sul; former Editor of the Psychiatry Journal of Rio Grande do Sul; and he has published papers on psychoanalytic technique.

Contributors: Carlos Mario Aslan, Martin Bergmann, Roosevelt M.S. Cassorla, Florence Guignard, Maria Cristina Melgar, Thomas H. Ogden, Maria Lucila Pelento, Jean-Michel Quinodoz, Priscilla Roth, Vamik D. Volkan, with a foreword by Ethel Spector Person'I am confident that the re-birth of the series will prove to be an extremely creative one. It is a good omen that the new edition starts with an introduction by Martin Bergmann, one of the most renowned psychoanalysts in the United States, and that the series begins with Mourning and Melancholia. Both melancholia and mourning are triggered by the same thing, that is, by loss. The distinction often made is that mourning occurs after the death of a loved one while in melancholia the object of love does not qualify as irretrievably lost. Melancholia is about a loss that is sometimes retrievable. What the IPA lost for a long stretch of time was the Freud series. Thus, the title seems a fitting introduction to the rebirth of this series. It is an antidote to the mourning and melancholia that some of us may have felt in losing the continuity of the series. This vital resurrection bodes well for the ongoing interchange among all our regions, each with its specific, andsometimes, unique, contributions.'- From the foreword by Ethel Spector Person

• Contemporary Freud , Contemporary Freud , Editor and contributors , Preface , Foreword , “Mourning and Melancholia“ (1917e [1915]) , Discussion of “Mourning and Melancholia“ , Melancholia, mourning, and the counter transference , Mourning for “missing” people , The analyst, his “mourning and melancholia”, analytic technique, and enactment , Not letting go: from individual perennial mourners to societies with entitlement ideologies , Mourning and creativity , A new reading of the origins of object relations theory , Mourning and mental development , “Mourning and Melancholia“: a Freudian metapsychological updating , Teaching Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia“