Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he later calls the super-ego. And that can be lacerated – if you think of the anorexic who sees themselves from the perspective of the image they have, of the image they have of themselves in the mirror which is false – that would be the super-ego. Super-ego is what generates depression and it is what has to be dealt with in psychoanalysis.
