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Melancholy seems to be one of the most enigmatic concepts since Antiquity. Mixed up with the pain of living and inherent in any human life, melancholy is often reduced to depression, a catch-all term and concept useful for the pharmaceutical industry. Using two clinical examples, we will see how the need to distinguish between two structures “neurotic depression and melancholy as a psychosis” guides treatment. Indeed, the relations with loss and lack are not identical in neurosis and psychosis: the father complex plays out differently.