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Melancholia is rightly considered to be the ultimate form of despair. It is the end of all freedom and hence of any kind of project, in the radical sense in which the term is used in phenomenological philosophy. But if this is so, we may ask ourselves why melancholics do not all kill themselves? Should we not assume that a future remains open, even when the horizon of any project has closed? Such a hypothesis leads to the paradoxical idea of melancholic hope. Linking melancholia to childhood is a way of exploring this paradox in greater depth, whether it is a case of trying to understand the origin of the illness or, conversely, of the resources that the patient still has at their disposal to avoid losing themselves entirely in it. We must therefore accept the graft of psychoanalysis onto phenomenology. It is up to psychoanalysis to shed light on what makes hope an empty form or not.