“Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” 

Freud’s essay ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’ looks at the different states of mourning and melancholy, how mourning is a conscious and therapeutic psychological process and melancholy unconscious and pathological. Melancholic states heighten self-criticism and man discovers the true negatives of himself when denied the control of his ego. Self-reproaches also often reflect individual criticisms of others as a consequence of the ego and also incorporates a layer of narcissism. Freud argues is the self-reproach of such that leads to attitudes of sadism and result in suicide. 

It was an alright essay but I am quite un-opinonated on such, hence it’s middle-ground rating. I was much more impressed by his essays on dreams and the Oedipus Complex as those really clicked with me and I started to really understand where he was coming from after initially dismissing him slightly.'Mourning and Melancholia' was interesting reading in relation to Hamlet but I only really logged it because it is on one of my self made reading challenges (every book ever referenced in my university lectures) and want to mark such as complete!