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| | Melancholia and AIDS |
 | | In a 1917 essay titled Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, began a career-long meditation on the manner in which the human psyche deals with loss. |
 | | By contrast, "melancholia," though sharing many of the surface characteristics of "mourning," is identified by Freud as a pathological illness, marked by an inability to recover from the loss, to "overcome" it, and to return to daily activities. |
 | | Thus, "the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound," a wound that refuses to heal, a loss that cannot be salved. |
| www.hammer.ucla.edu /etc/durer/pages/freud.html (276 words) |
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