The theme of such Dissertation is suicide as a consequence of identification with
the dead mother. It is a theoretical research based on the psycho-analytical theory
which recurs to the analysis of the character Richard Brown, from the motion
picture The Hours, in order to illustrate the theoretical argument that the
identification revival with the dead mother may be an unlinking factor for the
suicide of the melancholic patient in the adult life. Initially, it is tried to explicit the
dead mother concept, characterized as a mother who, even when present, is quite
absent as for the cares and love investment towards the child due to her
depression. Thus, to the child, the maternal image shall be one of a lifeless
mother, a dead mother. It shows identification with the dead mother as a psychic
defense to the traumatic situation provoked by the maternal love underinvestment.
The child, in the relationship with the mother, lives a psychic catastrophe which
Green has called narcissist trauma, what will determine the fate of the libidinal,
objective and narcissist investment of the individual. Hence, melancholy is
considered a psycho-pathology, manifested at an adult age by the individual
subjugated by the complex of the dead mother. The study of melancholy in the
Mourning and Melancholy of Freud furnishes subsidies to the understanding of the
inner world processes of those ones who want to terminate their own existence.
Melancholy evidences the struggle between the I and the Super-I on the roles of
accuser and accused ones. It shows that the Super-I becomes sadistic when
asking for perfection to the masochist I narcissistically impoverished by the
identification with the dead mother. When it gets to the sadistic borders, such
struggle leads the I, identified with the dead mother, to desire to eliminate the
object badly introduced to a part of the I, in order to rescue its idealized narcissist
value. It points out suicide as the psychical exit found by the melancholic patient to
get free from the identification with the dead mother. It is concluded that in the
suicide, the unconscious conflicts manifested in the adult life are revivals of the
psychic contents registered in childhood. In this paper, the revival of the
identification with the dead mother would have been the unlinking factor of suicide
of Richard Brown in his adult life.
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