[Senescence and melancholia (author's transl)]

This communication is an attempt to define, from a dynamic point of view, the specificity of the connection between depression and senescence. This aspect concerns primarily the subject's relation to his own death, the corporal nature of death being linked in a concurrent and irreducible way, with the unconscious reality of the "immortality phantasm". From a clinical observation, it is possible to show how depressive themes are images of death, in which way melancholia appears as the permanently manifest expression of the constantly deferred mourning. Involution is perceived no longer in terms of deficit but as the moment when death is substituted for the lost object, when the body becomes auto-destructive and reactivates through its betrayal all the previous experiences of mourning and separation.