Friendship after Freud: Reflections on the Death of a Friend and the End of a Friendship
Is there a difference, philosophically, between a friendship that ends due to a death and a friendship that ends because of something other than death? Is it worthwhile to talk about death, divorce, and loss in ethical or moral terms? I provide affirmative answers to both of these questions. I do so by defending the strange thesis statement that Sigmund Freud offers moral, normative, and wise judgments in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”about how to respond to the end of a friendship. Freud’s moral, normative, and wise judgments lead to a Freudian corrective to Seneca’s Stoicism. Freud’s articulation of melancholia becomes a moral claim when understood in relation to Immanuel Kant’s reflections on what is required, deontologically, after a friendship ends. I read Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”as contributing to the tradition of Kant’s deontological reasoning.