Melancholy

Etymology and significances

The word is borrowed from the Latin melancholia itself transcribed of the Greek μελανχολία ( melankholía ) composed of μέλας ( mélas ), “black” and of χολή ( khōlé ), “the Bile”. The word thus means étymologiquement the black bile. This returns to the theory humorale of Hippocrates according to which the body contains four moods which each one determines our temperament. These four moods are blood, the lymph, the yellow bile and the black bile. The temperament is thus blood when blood prevails, lymphatic when it is the lymph, bilieux for the yellow bile and finally melancholic person for the black bile. The concept of melancholy is thus very old and a major place was always given to him within the four temperaments. The melancholy has direction literary which means sadness.

Psychoanalysis

Karl Abraham isolates the depression as of 1911: it distinguishes it for example from a Anxiety neurosis.

The text founder for the psychoanalysis of the theory of the melancholy is Deuil and melancholy (1915, in Métapsychologie ). Freud and Polo compare the consecutive momentary depressive state with it with a mourning with the melancholy. Mourning is a normal reaction to a loss, whether it is human and emotional or ideal. The mechanism of mourning consists of an investment withdrawal of the lost object, in a withdrawal of the Libido, by the means of the recollection, of “ressassement”. Mourning can take a pathological turning, pouring in the psychosis by the refusal, or as in the Obsessional neurosis, when the mourning of the father forces a confrontation with the Oedipus complex .

According to Freud, mourning and the melancholy would share certain symptoms, put aside the low esteem of oneself, the overwhelming pressure of car-reproaches.

Freud, starting from this basic difference, deduced that the loss to which the melancholic person reacts is unconscious, and is not directly in relation to a real loss as in mourning.

The theory of Freud in connection with the melancholy postulates that the subject reacts to the loss while turning over its Libido in its own me: the melancholic person carried out the object investment withdrawal, but the quantity of libido remains intact and applied to ego, which becomes the lost object. Thus the melancholic person would regress with the narcissistic identification, becoming his own object, and privileging the slope of hatred: thus are explained the sometimes delirious car-reproaches. Freud thus presupposes three conditions at the origin of the melancholy: the loss of the object, ambivalence towards the object and regression of the libido in ego. At the time of this theorization, the term of “depression” was used as an adjective, in order to describe this general impoverishment of the emotional and intellectual life of the subject melancholic person. Thus what would be treated later in psychiatry like the maniaco-depressive Psychose or the bipolar Trouble was regarded as alternation of phases of Manie and melancholy.

The case Haitzmann, a “démoniaque neurosis” at the 17th century, is the most explicit presentation of a depression. Is Haitzmann an artist who sinks (or which lights?), with died of his/her father, in the depression. He makes then a Pacte with the Devil, asking him to find his father for a few years. From where the expression so curious about démoniaque neurosis…

The psychoanalytical contribution with the apprehension of the melancholy is also in the Depressive position described by Melanie Klein, and which would return to the formation even of ego, being born in the pain from ambivalence - indeed, there would be at the origins of this authority, for which the subject is caught, a depressive anguish having its origin in the Ambivalence vis-a-vis the total Objet.

One can identify three kinds of melancholy:

stuporeuse melancholy: the patient has a very great driving inhibition.
anxious melancholy: it is in this case where suicide rate is most important
the delirious melancholy: it is based on delirious thoughts as “I want that one restores the capital punishment for me”.

Psychiatry

One of the first nosographic entities to tackle the problem of the sadness like element of a pathological state, is the Neurasthénie, lack of nervous force , chronic functional disease of the nervous system . This depression appears under the influence of G. Mr. Beard. Modern psychiatry describes a depression. Thus, DSM IV describes a depressive episode as well as a depressive disorder ; several depressions are distinguished. Among those, the most serious depressive state is the depression melancholic person .

One can thus say that modern psychiatry calls melancholy the most pushed form depression; it is a serious affection largely leaving the field of the moroseness to consider a pathology, with the medical direction fully .

The symptoms melancholic persons are more thorough than the simple depression where one finds for example Aboulie, Anorexie, Insomnie, feeling of incurability, wishes of death, or a strong feeling of Culpabilité. In the melancholy a true mental pain is added to it (not less painful than a physical pain). The patient lives himself like having of another exit only death, for itself and sometimes for his close relations, those which he likes more. If it happens for example that a mother melancholic person kills her children and commits suicide, it is not by hatred but well by love, to avoid the hell of the life to them: it cannot imagine that it is differently.

Phenomenologic psychiatry (Tatossian, Tellenbach, Maldiney, Ludwig Binswanger,…)attempted to represent lived the melancholic person. Bending, even the damning up of temporality (lived time) is obviously a constant dimension, felt in the contact with the subject melancholic person. The inflexibility of its dramatic thought makes it hermetic to any influence of the entourage whereas he saw himself paradoxically, like already dead (interior feeling of vacuum, petrification, not-food); The suicidal desire is more not to undergo this death and the problems of the melancholic person are to kill itself. Its gesture will be done without call with a research of instantaneity and irreversibility. Convinced of its culpability and persuaded of the harmfulness which it even has for him and its entourage, its suicide given, will be prepared carefully in greatest clandestinity and will be often carried out with an altruistic purpose. The damning up of temporality adds a feeling of eternity of its state which traditional semiology named feeling of incurability. Much more than one severe depression, the melancholy is a pathological mode structurally different by this vital and nonpsychological characteristic from lived sound.

The melancholy can occur in a single episode, but more often it is the expression of a disorder is monopolar (comprising only episodes melancholic persons), that is to say bipolar (with episodes melancholic persons and maniacs) called in the past maniaco-depressive psychosis (E Kraepelin). It is a psychiatric urgency because of a maximum risk of suicide.

Treatments

In this pathology, the analytical treatment is extremely difficult to apply, being given nonthe absolute desire of these patients. Therefore it will be able to intervene only in the one third time, in order to avoid another crisis.

Melancholy through the ages and works

The melancholy takes various significances with the wire of the centuries. It describes, very generally, an apathetic state of distress, abandonment close to the depression:

with the XIIe century, in the courteous vocabulary, it indicates all kinds of states of heart going from major sadness to the madness;
with the XIVe century, Guillaume de Machaut makes melancholy the feeling which characterizes the jealous in love one which seeks loneliness;
with the XVIIe century, the direction weakens with that of soft and vague sadness;
with the XIXe century, the melancholy takes two directions: on the one hand that of a discomfort due to a major lack that one cannot identify and on the other hand it takes a clinical direction of mental disease associated with a deep abatement. The melancholy becomes synonymous with depression then.

The melancholy can also be seen as a “crowned disease” which in the Occidental culture related to all the expressions of the thought and art: philosophy, medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, religion and theology, literature, music and arts. The melancholy is a vector of fertility, clearness, of perspicacity, but also paradoxically of despair. Jean Starobinski and Wolf Lepenies said that the melancholy was a form of “remote setting” of the conscience vis-a-vis the “disenchantment” of the world.

In the Antiquity

As of the IV E, the funerary Stèle S attics introduce individuals taking of the installations of Deuil. The melancholy is thus attached to it to the loss of a close relation. To the VI E, Pénélope is represented in front of its weaving loom, any melancholic person.

Aristote wondered why all the men of exception are melancholic persons: " Why were all the men who illustrated themselves in philosophy, policy, in poetry, in arts, bilieux, and bilieux at this point to suffer from diseases which come from the black bile, such as for example, one Hercules quotes among the heroes? It seems that indeed Hercules had this temperament; and it is as while thinking of him as the Old ones called badly crowned the accesses of the epileptics. " (Transl. Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire, 1891).

For Hippocrates, the melancholy includes/understands like disorder of the black Bile. The Rate would be the body responsible for this disorder (whereas current medicine sees the body of the immunizing Défenses there).

the Middle Ages and during the Rebirth

The Paresse named Acédie is a démoniaque temptation which allures the Moine S. the usual translation is idleness: one of the seven deadly sins. The monks, isolated in the inactivity from the Monastery, world cups, plunged in silence, can sink in a named quite specific torpor acedia : Idleness of the spirit, overwhelming pressure… Soon Tentation S of all will follow sortes.

In 1621, Robert Burton publishes the Anatomie of the melancholy . It analyzes the causes and the effects and seeks remedies of them. It will distinguish for example a religious melancholy . The Anatomie of the melancholy constitutes an important sum of all the theories, knowledge concerning the melancholy, that Burton binds to the Deuil.

Among so much of thousands of authors, you will have evil to find some whose reading will make you somebody of a little better; quite to the contrary it will infect you whereas it should contribute to improve you.

Burton regarded itself as melancholic person.

Spleen

At the 17th century, George Cheyne redesigns the melancholy like state of heart, and re-elects it spleen . This expression becomes that of the poets. Charles Baudelaire was one of the great figures of the spleen.

“Any child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings: horror of the life and the extase of the life” ( My heart exposed , 1864)

At the 19th century

Evil of the century

The 19th century is characteristic of this evil which is the melancholy. Musset speaks about evil of the century , Chateaubriand of moral disease abominable. It takes in Flaubert the form of the trouble and Baudelaire the spleen . The melancholy at the 19th century results from a traumatism between the rejection of the Christianity of the Terror of 1793 and the fall of the Empire in 1814. The children of this generation have behind them great exploits and in front of them the future of new middle-class France by which the only prospect is to grow rich. The melancholy thus comes from an energy which cannot be invested and which becomes a black poison.

Saturn devouring his/her children

Saturn devouring his/her children is a table of 1823, of the painter Francisco Goya. This work belongs to a series of black paintings carried out between 1820 and 1823, after the upheaval of the war. It takes again accurately the topic of Cronos devouring her children, so expensive in Goya. This devoration, absorption, would report the root even of the melancholy, or its premises.

The table was used for the cover of seminar IV, the object-relationship , Jacques Lacan.

Søren Kierkegaard

Emphatiquement in the Fatal disease but also in Feared and tremor , Kierkegaard states that the human ones are composed of three parts: finished, the infinite one, and the relation between the two. Finished (the directions, the body, knowledge) and the infinite ones (the paradox and capacity to be believed) always exist in a state of tension. This tension, conscious of its existence, is the individual. When the individual is lost, insensitive or exuberant, the person is then in a state of despair. In particular, despair is not the anguish, it is, instead of that, the loss of the individual.

At the 20th century

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Nausea in 1938. It described there Antoine Roquentin, taken of a deep dislike for what surrounds, for its activities, and which takes refuge in the imaginary one. The title that Sartre wanted in the beginning to give to work was " Melancholia" , in reference to famous engraving To last.

Francoise Sagan

Francoise Sagan publishes Hello sadness .

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