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Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled In this early essay, Freud understands grief to be the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the object and the successful transferral of that cathexis onto a fresh object In The Ego and the Id, however, Freud revises this distinction between mourning and melancholia and suggests that the identification process associated with melancholia may be “the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (19) In other words, the identification with lost loves characteristic of melancholia becomes the precondition for the work of mourning.The two processes, originally conceived as oppositional, are now understood as integrally related aspects of the grieving process.35 In his later view, Freud remarks that the internalization of loss is compensatory: “When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object’ ”(20) Strictly speaking, the giving up of the object is not a negation of the cathexis, but its internalization and, hence, preservation What precisely is the topology of the psyche in which the ego and its lost loves reside in perpetual habitation? Clearly, Freud conceptualizes the ego in the perpetual company of the ego ideal which acts as a moral agency of various kinds The internalized losses of the ego are reestablished as part of this agency of moral scrutiny, the internalization of anger and blame originally felt for the object in its external mode In the act of internalization, that anger and blame, inevitably heightened by the loss itself, are turned inward and sustained; the ego changes place with the internalized object, thereby investing this internalized externality with moral agency and power.Thus, the ego forfeits its anger and efficacy to the ego ideal which turns against the very ego by which it is sustained; in other words, the ego constructs a way to turn against itself Indeed, Freud warns of the hypermoral possibilities of this ego ideal, which, taken to its extreme, can motivate suicide.36 The construction of the interior ego ideal involves the internali- 79
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