I have always been kind of skeptical of psychoanalysis in general and Freudian analysis specifically, but a couple of statements seemed to ring true to me in the reading. "When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia." (133) Now I won't pretend to know what my ego is in the Freudian sense, but I think melancholia is great way to describe the feeling after losing a "sexual object", or, as I take it to be, a possible or current love interest. You lose a piece of yourself when you lose someone you were close to and you lose the feeling of what could be when you are denied a possible relationship. Both of these feelings can best be described by melancholia – the unfinished process of grieving. It's a hurt that is the equivalent of death, at least at the beginning. However, Phillips, or Freud, goes on to say, "Mourning is immensely reassuring because it convinces us of something we might otherwise doubt; our attachment to others." (153) Sometimes it's better to feel pain than to feel nothing at all…

According to the authority that is me, there are three possible feelings to take towards another person: love, hate, and indifference. Love can be an affinity for a person; hate can be a small disliking; indifference is worse than death. To be completely indifferent to a person is the equivalent of ignoring their existence; it is to deny them subjectavation. Butler alludes to the indifference that comes along with a particularly bad case of melancholia when she states, "that ambivalence may well be a result of loss, that the loss of an object precipitates an ambivalence toward it as part of the process of letting it go." (174) One has to become completely indifferent from someone in order to truly let them go from life. I don't know if this occurs when someone dies, but it definitely has to occur after a long relationship ends. If one of the two people still has a feeling, either good or bad, towards the other then the relationship never really ends. Its stuck in a purgatory of one-sided longing that can never end well (Not to mention that if someone has feelings for someone else, but that someone else is indifferent towards those feelings, it destroy the person that holds those feelings.).