On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

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