Sigmund Freud's definition of melancholia takes as its focus the loss of a loved object that, rather than being ultimately relinquished over time as with the comparable condition of mourning, is retained and internalised by the sufferer, who then manifests an ‘exclusive devotion to mourning’. Not only does Freud acknowledge our unquestioning acceptance that ‘the mood of mourning [is] a “painful” one’, he also suggests that this experience takes on a metapsychological process: ‘this tendency can become so intense that it leads to a person turning away from reality and holding on to the object through a hallucinatory wish-psychosis’. Beyond this, the sufferer is subject to a ‘detour of self-punishment’ whereby ‘the indubitably pleasurable self-torment of melancholia … signifies the satisfaction of tendencies of sadism and hatred, which are applied to an object and are thus turned back against the patient's own person’. The grieving melancholic, then, experiences an uncanny state of pain and pleasure, reliving and re-experiencing a loss which is at once agonisingly acute yet also gratifying because it symbolises a means of retaining a connection – a diachronic oneness – with the lost object of desire. The complex of melancholia, according to Freud, ‘behaves like an open wound’, drawing energies towards itself and leaving the self impoverished.

As an open wound, melancholia is therefore strikingly resonant with Judeo-Christian imagery.5 Amy Hollywood makes the connections between mourning, melancholia, and Christian mysticism explicit in her study of Beatrice of Nazareth and Margaret Ebner, arguing for a pattern that moves: