The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of one’s sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss. In Freud’s 1917 meditation on melancholia, he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholia: It entails “a loss of a more ideal kind [than mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love.” Moreover, Freud suggests, the melancholic subject will often not know precisely what about the object has been loved and lost—“this would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.” The loss precipitating melancholia is more often than not unavowed and unavowable. Finally, Freud suggests that the melancholic subject—low in self-regard, despairing, even suicidal—has shifted the reproach of the once loved object (a reproach waged for not living up to the idealization by the beloved) onto itself, thus preserving the love or idealization of the object even as the loss of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic.

Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’ (1999) 26(3) Boundary 2 19 at 19-20