The Psychology of Loss: Mourning and Melancholia in Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran

Abstract

Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran (2024) traces the lifelong friendship of Elaheh “Ellie” Soltani and Homa Roozbeh amid the political and social transformations of twentieth-century Iran. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” this study examines how experiences of loss shape Ellie’s psychological development. It focuses particularly on the deaths, separations, betrayal, guilt, and persistent attachment to the past that complicate her process of grieving. The study argues that Ellie’s responses to loss oscillate between mourning, through which loss can gradually be acknowledged and worked through, and melancholic tendencies, in which unresolved loss remains psychologically internalized and intertwined with guilt and self-reproach. Homa consequently represents not only a lost friendship but also an internalized connection to Ellie’s courage, authenticity, and earlier sense of self. The study further demonstrates how personal experiences of loss intersect with broader historical losses, including political freedom, security, belonging, and home. Ultimately, the novel portrays the confrontation and working-through of painful memories as essential to transforming unresolved guilt into responsibility and enabling reconciliation with the past.

Keywords:  Mourning, Melancholia, Loss, Guilt, Identification, Psychoanalysis.