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.

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“