The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva

390 Pages·2002·19.55 MB·English

by  Jennifer Radden

THE NATURE OF MELANCHOLY
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THE NATURE OF MELANCHOLY
From Aristotle to Kristeva
Edited by
Jennifer Radden
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published in 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2002
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The nature of melancholy : from Aristotle to Kristeva / edited by
Jennifer Radden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-512962-8; 0-19-515165-8 (pbk.)
i. Melancholy. I. Radden, Jennifer.
BF575-M44N38 2000
152.4—dc2i 99-16828
3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my children,
Tristram,
Beatrice,
and
Patrick
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Preface
FOR MOST OF western European history, melancholy was a central
cultural idea, focusing, explaining, and organizing the way people
saw the world and one another and framing social, medical, and episte-
mological norms. Today, in contrast, it is an insignificant category, of
little interest to medicine or psychology, and without explanatory or or-
ganizing vitality. In homage to its past, I have gathered here selections
from some of the most influential sources on melancholy in the long
tradition preceding Freud's 1917 "Mourning and Melancholia," an
essay that ushers in a new type of theorizing and represents, in certain
respects, the completion of this tradition. These texts on melancholic
states form the centerpiece of the book. (The terms melancholic state,
melancholy, and melancholia are not distinguished in the following dis-
cussion; nor were they, in any consistent way, in past writing.) But I
have also included a small number of later twentieth-century discus-
sion on clinical depression.
Writing about melancholy has customarily been broad, directed not
only toward defining but also toward remedying melancholy disposi-
tions, states, and conditions. Some of these prescriptions make for
interesting reading, and others are closely related to the nature and
causes of melancholy. However, I chose the excerpts and texts that
follow to introduce conceptual questions about melancholy—what it
is, rather than what to do about it. My emphasis is on the categoriza-
tion, definition, origin (or etiology), and phenomenological qualities of
these states. On another principle of selection, I preferred longer ex-
cerpts to wider representation. Thus, one excerpt often stands in for a
whole tradition of writing (a tradition I have attempted to at least
sketch in my remarks preceding each selection).
The texts are presented in the order they were written, although not
always in the order they were printed, and in English translation. Rep-
resented are the humoral theories of the Greek physicians; Aristotelian
speculation about melancholy and inspiraton; the early church fathers'
writing on the sin of acedia, that state of despondency that seems to
have shaped later medieval conceptions of melancholy; the Arabic doc-
tors who preserved Greek learning and returned it to western Europe
in the early Middle Ages; female saints of the early and late Middle
Ages concerned with understanding melancholia among cloistered
women; Renaissance thinkers such as Ficino, Bright, and Burton, who
devoted whole treatises to melancholy; seventeenth-century specula-
tions on melancholy, witchcraft, and demonic possession; eighteenth-
century classifications of melancholic states; attempts to explain melan-
choly with the new, naturalistic science; illustrations of melancholy in
Romantic, symbolist, and decadent literary traditions; some of the clas-
sics of early psychiatry from the end of the nineteenth century and the
very beginning of the twentieth century; and, finally, a selection to il-
lustrate twentieth-century models: loss theories, cultural causation
theories, and biomedical theories.
By the twentieth century, when melancholy has lost its definitive
and vital role, we ignore past discussion of melancholy at some cost.
But these discussions have special interest for us at the end of the twen-
tieth century for several more specific reasons. Most immediately, we
now possess authoritative, recent English translations and editions of
almost all of these works, some constituting the very first complete En-
glish versions, and others revising and reviving material long out of
print.
The second reason is that we approach the writing collected here
equipped with new methodology and theories of knowledge. Contem-
porary epistemologies encourage us to revisit what we once believed we
knew and to reevalute that knowledge. We are impelled to question
both what we supposed we found in a text and what we supposed the
text discovered in the world.
This material has particular allure in contemporary times for a third
reason. Current nonmedical writing about depression, and even mel-
ancholy, abounds. Moreover, contemporary discussions in philosophy,
psychology, cultural and feminist studies, and the history of ideas all
introduce distinctions and perspectives that require us to reconsider
earlier writing about melancholic states.
We are uniquely positioned to reevaluate these texts for a fourth
reason. The majority of the writing on melancholy predates the artifi-
cial divisions we know today as the academic disciplines. Thus a rigor-
ous analysis of the type of writing included here, and the cultural con-
ceptions of melancholy it illustrates, requires an approach that is
thoroughly interdisciplinary. A shift toward interdisciplinary scholar-
ship during the last quarter of the twentieth century, seen in thinkers
such as Michel Foucault and Sander Gilman, and in new fields such as
women's studies, has equipped us with a model for interdisciplinary in-
quiry and analysis. Nowhere is this model more necessary than in the
study of the long cultural "obsession" with melancholic states evi-
denced in the material collected here.
The history of melancholy and melancholia told through the texts
from Aristotle to Freud is particularly evocative and intriguing. Read-
viii PREFACE
ing these sources we discover a kind of conversation, or dialogue, con-
ducted across centuries—and continents—as their authors interpret
and respond to the classical, Arabic, and Renaissance sources on melan-
choly. Each author reads, and variously understands, Hippocrates,
Galen, and Aristotle. Later, in the Renaissance period, Robert Burton
reads Ficino and Timothie Bright, and in turn is read by every thinker
who follows him, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This iterative effect is deeply and perhaps unexpectedly conserva-
tive. The conversation changes languages, going from Greek to Arabic
and Syrian before it emerges in medieval Latin and finally in the
French, English, and German of the modern period. It also changes
cultures, taking place in Asia Minor as well as on the European and
American continents. With such changes we would expect older theo-
ries, meanings, and associations to be superseded and eventually re-
placed by newer conceptions. We would expect new ideas and struc-
tures to overwhelm the old. Suprisingly, however, little is lost. Widely
divergent and incompatible causal accounts are introduced together.
(Melancholy is seen to result from earthly things—bile and dryness; as-
tronomical movements [especially those of the planet Saturn]; and su-
pernatural influences, the work of the Devil. Particularly since the
modern period, it is also regarded as the result of social and psychologi-
cal occurrences—too much creativity, idleness, or grief.) More puz-
zling: different and contrary meanings of melancholy and melancholia
seem to accumulate and coexist, creating ambiguity and resonance as
the centuries go by. Melancholy is both a normal disposition and a sign
of mental disturbance; it is both a feeling and a way of behaving. It is a
nebulous mood but also a set of self-accusing beliefs.
With increasingly scientific thinking and more exact clinical medi-
cine, some of the ambiguities surrounding the issue of what melan-
choly is, which have gone strangely unremarked through many cen-
turies, can be seen to come into sudden focus. A discernible tension and
struggle ensue, whereupon melancholia and clinical depression begin
to pull apart from the contradictory, multifaceted, amorphous, rich,
and resonant melancholy of past times.
Of the many themes and recurrent assumptions revealed through
this series of texts, the strangest one to contemporary readers is proba-
bly the appeal to humoral states. Melancholy comes from two Greek
words, melas (black) and /{hole (bile). Greek science had taught that
there were four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and conceived of
health as a balanced relationship between four humors, fluids or sub-
stances present in the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yel-
low bile. Variations in these humors explained normal variation in
temperament from one person to another, as well as states of disorder
in a given person. Articulated first by the Greek physician Hippocrates
writing in the century B.C.E., affirmed by Aristotle, Galen, and the Ara-
bic physicians, and maintained in some form until well into the eigh-
PPrreeffaaccee iixx