Melancholia - A perverse act? The case of the frog and the eel

And as one sees most fearful things, In the crystal of a dream, We saw the greasy hempen rope, Hooked to the blackened beam, And heard the prayer, the hangman's snare, He looked upon the garish day, With such a wistful eye, The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.[1] In his seminal article entitled Mourning and Melancholia[2], Freud explained and distinguished the clinical differences between the two phenomena, but remained stymied in his attempts to develop a fundamental clinical structure to account for the appearance of melancholia in a subject as opposed to a mourning reaction.…