On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

Both melancholia and mourning are triggered by the same thing, that is, by loss. The distinction often made is that mourning occurs after the death of a loved one while in melancholia the object of love does not qualify as irretrievably lost. Melancholia is about a loss that is sometimes retrievable.

This book contains a translation of Freud's original text, originally published in 1917, followed by a scholarly discussion of it.