This study addresses melancholia in both its psychiatric and its psychoanalytic concepts, including Lacan's formulation. According to Lacan, melancholia consists of a real presence of the object in the field of the subject - rather than presence as metaphor or by identification. We briefly discuss the history of the definition of melancholia from Esquirol to Kraepelin, then take up Cotard's work on hypochondriac delusions. Freud's thesis of identification by the ego is then discussed and followed by Lacan's considerations. Lacan distinguishes the idealized object of the love relationship from the object cause of desire, which remains hidden. In melancholia the question is the direct relation of the subject with this object. The emergence of object "a" to the foreground provides the general formula of the status of the subject in psychosis, where the object is in command.
Psychoanalysis; melancholia; Cotard; object "a"