Abstract
As widely demonstrated by personal and clinical accounts, the onset of melancholic episodes is sometimes incomprehensible at light of present life circumstances, suggesting, as remarked by Freud, that in opposition to mourning the endured loss is not fully acknowledge or remains inaccessible to the conscious subject. Putting aside the question of whether the triggering of melancholic episodes has endogenous origins, Psychoanalysis sustained that this inaccessibility, due to the fact that the melancholic ego develops an identification with object, means that the subject was and remains incapable to mourn the lost object, unable to symbolically elaborate on its absence. Therapy depends on the ability to provide such a work of morning and the introjection of the lost object. Accordingly with various psychoanalytic theories, melancholia is marked by unconscious attempts to revive the lost object, by incorporating it inside oneself, in order to safeguard an original phantasy, which results in the general impoverishment of one’s vitality and ability to enjoy as it is attested by the prevalence of chronic symptoms of motor inhibition and asymbolia. The affects and drives of the subject became imprisoned in the relation with the first objects of the identificatory process, and the ego is under attack, constantly menaced by fragmentation, for he deemed himself unable to retain the more precious. One of the major problems in a theoretical approach to melancholia, relates to the plethora of meanings, conceptions and terminology it involves. In the present work, I will try to overcome, or at least minimize, this difficulty by privileging J. Kristeva’s account, relying mostly on her magnificent work Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987). In various works, Kristeva proposed a valuable model to access pre-linguist affects and drives that remain entrapped in an uncompleted or wounded identificatory process. She considered two forms of antidepressants—Psychoanalysis and Art (poetic language and music)—that, under specific conditions, can access and retrieve the relation with the ambiguous object amending such a bound by introjection and sublimation. Kristeva’s contribution has been invaluable in expanding our sense of the corporeal and imaginary dimensions of the unconscious. But despite the depths of her analysis of the way the semiotic processes influence moods and conscious representation, sometimes she seems to lose sight of the communicative dimension of the illness, not only in the therapeutic session but also in aetiology and everyday symptomatology. What we consider the scope of the virtual in therapy relies on a particular kind of negativity capable to grasp and transform the constitutive bifaciality of the subject, its psychic and communicative dimensions. It is from that junction that the patient is summoned to expose his feeling and thoughts providing them with new meaning. The therapeutic exploration of affective blockages grounded on the identificatory process, as it happens in melancholia, depends upon the recursive and retroactive access to the sequences and selectivity of meaning systems, not only psychic but also communicative. This access requires the virtualization of repressed elements surpassing extreme resistance to analytic transference. Instead of a full-blown exposition of the unconscious processes or the postulation of its presumed truth, the medium of therapy relies on the conditions to receive and transform elements prompt in the course of the therapeutic session. Despite its transformative techniques, the dynamic of this interactive medium differs from ordinary forms of conversation and support precisely by relinquishing a linear or pre-established path for amelioration.
The research for this article was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia with reference SFRH/BPD/116555/2016.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
It is possible to argue that this increase of precision, which one can associate with the advent of Psychiatric observation and experimentation on the 19th century, leads to an impoverishment on the previous valence of melancholia as an irreplaceable condition that provides the ability to conceive and reconceive the world. That tradition had always seen melancholia “as a form of malaise that denounces the imbalances between some members of a given society (Kehl 2009: 74). This aspect is particularly salient in the frequent associations between the melancholic temperament and the satiric or even the utopian.
- 2.
The medical writings of Mandeville are an exemplar landmark on a long transition from the Hippocratic and Galenic models to a new epistemology able to account for the role of the individual both on the particular configuration of his illness and on the therapeutic process (cf. Carvalho 2014).
- 3.
- 4.
However, one must bear in mind that the transition to comprehensive methods was gradual and “the relation of the doctor with the melancholic oscillated between indulgent generosity and brutal severity (…). Alternating between complaisant and harsh methods [the doctors] tried to achieve the most reliable efficacy to break the defenses and reach the conscience of the sick” (Starobinski 2012: 179).
- 5.
- 6.
Here we can add the immense variety of terms available in the jargon of self-help literature. On the semantic clusters organizing the variegated and diffuse field of contemporary offers of positive therapies see the work of Illouz (2008: 105 ff.).
- 7.
I explored the theoretical dimension of the virtual in Cybertherapeutic settings in a previous work (cf. Carvalho 2015).
- 8.
I use this concept in the similar way it way applied in System’s Theory (cf. e.g. Fuchs 1998).
- 9.
“[P]eople never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.” (Freud 1917: 244).
- 10.
“[T]he manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was the cause of his suffering.” (Freud 1917: 255).
- 11.
As we will see this is “the wound the melancholic attempts to hide, wall in, encrypt” (Abraham and Torok (1994: 135).
- 12.
“The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies—which in the transference neuroses we have called ‘anti-cathexes’—from all directions and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished.” (Freud 1917: 253).
- 13.
In analogy with the mourning person facing the dead of a loved one, infans should leave the object to rest, replacing the warmth of its presence with its “memory”. Not only is this replacement deemed unacceptable by the melancholic, he considers it unfaithful to the unblemished love attributed to the object. The apory of making memory and tribute was underlined by Derrida: “[e]ach time we know our friend to be gone forever, irremediably absent, annulled to the point of knowing or receiving nothing himself of what takes place in his memory (…). For never will we believe either in death or immortality; and we sustain the braze of this terrible light through devotion, for it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and because we live this or that in his memory, in memory of him” (Derrida 1989: 21).
- 14.
- 15.
“At the very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in process of formation or is still feeble. The id sends part of this libido out into erotic object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force itself on the id as a love-object. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects” (Freud 1923: 46).
- 16.
Following Soler (2002: 52–62) we can present the particular admission of guilt in the melancholic subject, whereas the paranoid repels any fault for the Other, the melancholic reclaims all the fault for himself. “His posture is in itself really inverse and stays in opposition to sublimatory elaboration. The delirium of indignity in itself, whch is all that remains of symbolic realaboration in melancholia (…) locates in the christalized fixity of guilty consciousness whose inertia contrasts with the interpretative dinamism of the paranoid delirium” (Soler 2002: 62).
- 17.
- 18.
In the present work, I have no opportunity to fully explore the particularities of these currents and will only sketch a mapping of the virtual dimension implied (and necessary) in the treatment of melancholia.
- 19.
This concept is adapted from platonic myth of the cosmogenesis in Timaeus.
- 20.
Concerning its unconscious dimensions, Fuchs (1999: 16–17) says that in that pre-linguistic level of the psychic system “there is no speech, no silence, just possibly a drift upwards toward the spheres where language has already become effective and is retroactively conferring onto the nonmeaning having penetrated here a contingent meaning”.
- 21.
“[N]egation is a lifting of the repression [Aufhebung der Verdrängung], though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed” (Freud 1925: 235–236).
- 22.
In his interpretation of the Freudian essay, Hyppolite (1955: 884–885) stressed that this presumed division is a myth.
- 23.
“There is no stronger evidence that we have been successful in our effort to uncover the unconscious than when the patient reacts to it with the words ‘I didn’t think that’, or ‘I didn’t (ever) think of that’” (1925: 239).
- 24.
In Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980) Kristeva developed the idea that along the acquisition of identity the spectrum of the abject will be a continuous threat.
- 25.
That is, the hypothesis, always contested by Klein of a inobjectal state: “The hypothesis that a stage extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that—except for the libido attached to the infant's own body—impulses, phantasies anxieties, and defenses either are not present in him, or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacuo. The analysis of very young children has taught me that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object-relations are at the center of emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defenses are also operative from the beginning and are ab initio indivisibly linked with object-relations. This insight showed me many phenomena in a new light.” (Klein 1952: 52–53).
- 26.
This influence is reassessed in the second volume of her Le Génie féminin. La vie, la folie, les mots. Reviewing Lacan’s arid conception of the imaginary, Kristeva values the heterogeneity of the internal objects detailed by Klein: “conglomerate of representations, sensations and substances” irreducible to Lacan’s scopic model of the constitution of the “ideal ego”; a “theoretical impurity compensated by its clinical fecondity” (Kristeva 2000: 70).
- 27.
Some of the most impressive descriptions of this melancholic symptom can be found in Ph. Pinel’s Medico-philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation (e.g. 1809, 167).
- 28.
This has to do with the difficulty of including, like Klein does, the sexual drive as part of the sublimation of the lost object. Green exposed the problem: “on the one hand, sublimation appears to be a vicissitude of the sexual drive, a purified form which has its place among other possible vicissitudes but which remains within the patrimony of Eros, and, on the other, sublimation is the adverse counterpart of Eros which, far from serving its aims, sides with those forces which are antagonistic to its purposes (Thanatos). The paradox cannot easily be overcome, and this is the path which Freud’s work (the product of his sublimation) will follow” (Green 1999b: 219).
- 29.
See in particularly the forth study of Proust and the Sense of Time (Kristeva 1993: 77–98).
- 30.
According to Green this distinction is already clear to Freud which “maintains that pain is the proper reaction to the loss of the object, whereas anxiety is the reaction to the danger that this loss entails, and consequently a displacement, the reaction to the danger of the loss itself. Thus the loss of the object produces pain by the irruption of an uncontrollable quantity into the ego, which provokes a feeling of helplessness (Hilflosigkeit). To avoid pain and helplessness, the signal of anxiety anticipates the catastrophe and orders the ego to set up defensive operations capable of controlling the disorganizing threat” (Green 1999a, b: 68).
- 31.
Recently Fuchs (2005) explored the experience of melancholia focusing on its embodied dimension, and highlighted the increasing sense of entrapment and heaviness of one’s body. This intense sense of one’s concretude and special circumscription was already explored by previous phenomenological psychiatry.
- 32.
In his “Discours de Rome” Lacan considered the challenge the depressive posed to the Analyst was how to overcome his “empty word”, “the mirage of the monologue” in which the associative process is disconnected from the unconscious knowledge (Lacan 1966: 247–265).
- 33.
Already at the “Draft G” Freud (1895: 99) sees anorexia as a form of melancholia.
- 34.
In his comparative studies Kleinman (1988) showed that in non-western cultures the concept of depression is primarily supported in bodily manifestations. On the other hand, one must refer the deep historical connexions between melancholia and hypochondria, always associated with the sense of unworthiness (Noyes 2005).
- 35.
- 36.
Abraham and Torok (1994: 125) mark their objection to Klein’s theory for supposing that such encryptation of the lost object can take place prior to the differentiation of the ego.
References
Abraham, Karl. 1971. Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido aufgrund der Psychoanalyse seelischer Störungen. In Psychoanalytische Studien. 1. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1994. Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection Versus Incorporation. In The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. N.T. Rand, 125–138. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Balsemão-Pires, Edmundo. 2015. Second Order Ethics. Uncanny. Philosophy and Cultural Studies Journal 2: 31–60.
Balsemão-Pires, Edmundo. 2016. Terapia. Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 49 (25): 281–326.
Biegler, Paul. 2011. The Ethical Treatment of Depression: Autonomy Through Psychotherapy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Binswanger, Ludwig. 1960. Melancholie und Manie: Phänomenologische Studien. Pfullingen: Neske.
Carvalho, Cláudio. 2014. Mandeville and the Therapeutics of Melancholic Passions. In Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy, ed. E. Balsemão-Pires and J. Braga, 147–166. Berlin: Springer.
Carvalho, Cláudio. 2015. Therapeutic Intervention and High-Order Adjustments of Recursion. Journal of Sociocybernetics 13 (2): 49–71. (Special Issue).
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Mémoires: For Paul de Man, eds. and trans. C. Lindsay et al. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ehrenberg, Alain. 2009. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. D. Homel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Fedida, Pierre. 1972. Le cannibalisme mélancolique. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 6: 123–127.
Ferro, Antonino. 2011. Negation, Negative Capability, and the Work of Creativity. In On Freud’s “Negation”, eds. Mary Kay O’Neil and Salman Akhtar, 222–236. London: Karnac.
Ferenczi, Sandor. 1920. The Further Development of the Active Therapy in Psycho-Analysis. In Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, compiled by John Rickman, 198–217. London and New York: Karnac (1994).
Ferenczi, Sandor. 1925. Contra-Indications to the ‘Active’ Psycho-Analytical Technique. In Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, compiled by John Rickman, 217–230. London and New York: Karnac (1994).
Freud, Sigmund. 1895. Draft G: Melancholia. In The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. J. M. Masson, 98–105. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1917 [1915]. Mourning and melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, 239–258. London: Hogarth Press (1957).
Freud, Sigmund. 1923. The Ego and the Id. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, 1–66. London: Hogarth Press (1957).
Freud, Sigmund. 1925. Negation. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19. ed. and trans. J. Strachey, 235–239. London: Hogarth Press (1957).
Freud, Sigmund. 1940. An Outline of Psycho-analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, 144–207. London: Hogarth Press (1964).
Fuchs, Peter. 1998. Realität der Virtualität - Aufklärungen zur Mystik des Netzes. In Virtuelle Wirtschaft, Virtuelle Unternehmen, Virtuelle Produkte, Virtuelles Geld und virtuelle Kommunikation, 301–322. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Fuchs, Peter. 1999. The Modernity of Psychoanalysis. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 74 (1): 14–29.
Fuchs, Thomas. 2005. Corporealized and Disembodied Minds. A phenomenological View of the Body in Melancholia and Schizophrenia. Philosophy Psychiatry & Psychology. 12: 95–107.
Green, André. 1986. The dead mother. In Id. On Private Madness. London: Karnac.
Green, André. 1999a. The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Routledge.
Green, André. 1999b. The Work of the Negative, trans. A. Weller. London: Free Association Press.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1955. Commentaire parlé sur la “Verneinung” de Freud. In Lacan. Écrits, 879–888. Paris: Éditions du Seuil (1966).
Illouz, Eva. 2008. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kearney, Richard. 2003. Strangers and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness. London: Routledge.
Kehl, Maria Rita. 2009. O tempo e o cão: a atualidade das depressões. São Paulo: Boitempo.
Klein, Melanie. 1940. Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. In Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works. Vol. 1 of The Writings of Melanie Klein, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle, Betty Joseph, Edna O’Shaughnessy and Hanna Segal, 344–369. New York: Hogarth Press (1975).
Klein, Melanie. 1952. The Origins of Transference. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963. Vol. 3 of The Writings of Melanie Klein, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle, Betty Joseph, Edna O’Shaughnessy and Hanna Segal, 48–56. New York: Hogarth Press (1975).
Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience. New York: Free Press.
Kraus, Alfred. 1991. Modes d’existence des hystériques et des mélancolique. 37. In Psychiatrie et existence, ed. P. Fédida, J. Schotte. Grenoble: Jérôme Million.
Kraus, Alfred. 2016. Melancholia from the Perspective of the Self. In An Experiential Approach to Psychopathology, ed. G. Stanghellini and M. Aragona, 189–219. Switzerland: Springer.
Kristeva, Julia. 1974. La révolution du langage poétique; l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Kristeva, Julia. 1987. Soleil noir. Dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard.
Kristeva, Julia. 1993. Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 2000. Le Génie féminin. La vie, la folie, les mots. Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein. Colette, vol. 2. Paris: Fayard.
Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Maldiney, Henri. 1991. Penser l’homme et la folie. À la lumière de l’analyse existentielle et de l’analyse du destin. Grenoble: J. Millon.
Noyes, Russell. 2005. Hypochondriasis: A Review. In. Somatoform Disorders, ed. Mario Maj et al., 129–160. West Sussex: Wiley.
Pinel, Philippe. 1809. Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, 2nd ed. Paris: Brosson.
Radden, Jennifer. 2009. Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2014. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soler, Colette. 2002. L’Inconscient à ciel ouvert de la psychose. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail.
Starobinski, Jean. 2012. L’Encre de la mélancolie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Styron, William. 2008 [1990]. Darkness Visible. A Memoir of Madness. New York: Open Road Integrated Media.
Tellenbach, Hubert. 1961. Melancholie: Zur Problemgeschichte, Typologie, Pathogenese und Klinik. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Tellenbach, Hubert. 1980. Typus Melancholicus. In Die Psychologie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Band X, 465–70. Zürich: Kindler.
von Foerster, Heinz. 2003 [1991]. Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics. In Understanding Understanding. Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition, 287–304. New York: Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Carvalho, C.A.S. (2019). The Scope of the Virtual in the Treatment of Melancholia. In: Braga, J. (eds) Conceiving Virtuality: From Art To Technology. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24751-5_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24750-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24751-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)