A Field Guide to Melancholy E-Book

Jacky Bowring

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 272

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A depressive illness or a passing feeling? Mental detachment or a precursor to genius? Melancholy is a critical part of what it is to be human, yet everything from Prozac to self help psychology books seems intent on removing all signs of sadness, depression, or, quite simply, low moods from contemporary existence. Complex and contradictory, melancholy's presence weaves through the histories of both science and art. A Field Guide to Melancholy surveys this ambivalent concept and takes a journey through its articulation in a variety of languages, from the Russian toska of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, to kaiho - which is expressed in the dancing of the Finnish tango. Melancholy is found in the historic traditions of death's presence in paradise, the tears of nature, along with nostalgia, pathos, and melancholy's presiding god, Saturn. In contemporary society, melancholy becomes a fashion statement in the subculture of the Emo whilst shelves are rife with self help books encouraging readers to overcome depression. By drawing on a range of disciplines from psychology and philosophy to architecture and design, and by examining the work of creative figures as different as Ingmar Bergman, Albrecht Dürer, WG Sebald and Tom Waits, Jacky Bowring provides an original perspective on one of the most elusive, enigmatic and fascinating of human conditions.

Leseprobe

A depresssive illness or a passing feeling?

Mental detachment or a precursor to genius?

Melancholy is a critical part of what it is to be human, yet everything from Prozac to self-help psychology books seems intent on removing all signs of sadness from contemporary existence. Complex and contradictory, melancholy's presence weaves through the histories of both science and art.

AFieldGuidetoMelancholy surveys this ambivalent concept and takes a journey through its articulation in a variety of languages, from the Russian toska of Pushkin's EugeneOnegin, to kaiho - which is expressed in the dancing of the Finnish tango. Melancholy is found in the historic traditions of death's presence in paradise, the tears of nature, along with nostalgia, pathos, and melancholy's presiding god, Saturn. In contemporary society, melancholy becames a fashion statement in the subculture of the Emo.

By drawing on a range of disciplines from psychology and philosophy to architecture and design, and by examining the work of creative figures as different as Ingmar Bergman, Albrecht Durer, WG Sebald and Tom Waits, Jacky Bowring provides an original perspective on one of the most elusive, enigmatic and fascinating of human conditions.

About the Author

DrJackyBowring is a critic, designer and writer. She is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University in New Zealand, and has published widely on landscape and architecture, working with ideas from psycho-analyis, literary theory, and aesthetic conventions such as the picturesque and the sublime.

For Jasper and Ella

Praise for AFieldGuidetoMelancholy

'Sadness is good for you' - Guardian

'an important and timely contribution tot he study and culture of melancholy' - Emotion, SpaceandSociety

'a worthy introduction to Cioran, and that is but one of its merits' - SanFranciscoGuardian

'This quietly elegant book is a piercing lexicon of the enigmatic and elusive human condition known as 'melancholy'' - NewZealandListener, Best Books of 2009

'Immediate and pensive, taking an identifiable approach to a feeling that we all indulge in' - Metro

Rosalind: They say you are a melancholy fellow.

Jaques: I am so; I do love it better than laughing.

Shakespeare, As You Like It

Contents

Introduction

1. The Conundrums of Melancholy: Madness, Genius and Beauty

Melancholy and Madness: ‘A disorder of the intellect’; Melancholy and Genius: ‘A disease of heroes’; Melancholy and Beauty: ‘Spirited sadness’

2. The Hunt for Melancholy

The Face of Melancholy; The Place of Melancholy; The Time of Melancholy

3. Acedia, Anomie, et al.: Melancholy’s Allies

Acedia; Anomie/Anomy; Et in Arcadia Ego; Lacrimae rerum; Love Melancholy; Nostalgia; Pathos; Religious Melancholy; Tristitia; Ubi sunt?

4. From Apea to Weltschmerz: A Lexicon of Melancholy

Chinese; English; Finnish; French; German; Japanese; Portuguese; Russian; Spanish; Turkish

5. A ‘Blue’ Guide: Melancholy in Cinema, Art, Literature, Music, Architecture and Landscape

A Film Festival of Melancholy; A Melancholy Art Exhibition; A Library of Melancholy Literature; A Melancholy Playlist; The Architecture and Landscape of Sadness

6. By Way of Conclusion: Melancholy and the Imagination

7. A Note on Laurence Aberhart

Further Reading and Bibliography

Introduction

Laurence Aberhart, Files,Wanganui, 1 July 1986

Introduction

Melancholy is a twilight state; suffering melts into it and

becomes a sombre joy. Melancholy is the pleasure

of being sad.

Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea1

Melancholy is ambivalent and contradictory. Although it seems at once a very familiar term, it is extraordinarily elusive and enigmatic. It is something found not only in humans – whether pathological, psychological, or a mere passing mood – but in landscapes, seasons, and sounds. They too can be melancholy. Batman, Pierrot, and Hamlet are all melancholic characters, with traits like darkness, unrequited longing, and genius or heroism. Twilight, autumn and minor chords are also melancholy, evoking poignancy and the passing of time.

How is melancholy defined? A Field Guide to Melancholy traces out some of the historic traditions of melancholy, most of which remain today, revealing it to be an incredibly complex term. Samuel Johnson’s definition, in his eighteenth century Dictionary of the English Language, reveals melancholy’s multi-faceted nature was already well established by then: ‘A disease, supposed to proceed from a redundance of black bile; a kind of madness,in which the mind is always fixed on one object; a gloomy, pensive, discontented temper.’2 All of these aspects – disease, madness and temperament – continue to coalesce in the concept of melancholy, and rather than seeking a definitive definition or chronology, or a discipline-specific account, this book embraces contradiction and paradox: the very kernel of melancholy itself.

As an explicit promotion of the ideal of melancholy, the Field Guide extols the benefits of the pursuit of sadness,and questions the obsession with happiness in contemporary society. Rather than seeking an ‘architecture of happiness’, or resorting to Prozac-with-everything, it is proposed that melancholy is not a negative emotion, which for much of history it wasn’t – it was a desirable condition, sought for its ‘sweetness’ and intensity. It remains an important point of balance – a counter to the ‘loss of sadness’. Not grief, not mourning, not sorrow, yet all of those things.

Melancholy is profoundly interdisciplinary, and ranges across fields as diverse as medicine, literature, art, design, psychology and philosophy. It is over two millennia old as a concept, and its development pre-dates the emergence of disciplines.While similarly enduring concepts have also been tackled by a breadth of disciplines such as philosophy, art and literature, melancholy alone extends across the spectrum of arts and sciences, with significant discourses in fields like psychiatry, as much as in art. Concepts with such an extensive period of development (the idea of ‘beauty’ for example) tend to go through a process of metamorphosis and end up meaning something distinctly different.3 Melancholy has been surprisingly stable. Despite the depth and breadth of investigation, the questions, ideas and contradictions which form the ‘constellation’4 of melancholy today are not dramatically different from those at any time in its history. There is a sense that, as psychoanalytical theorist Julia Kristeva puts it, melancholy is ‘essential and transhistorical’.5

Melancholy is a central characteristic of the human condition, and Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth century abbess and mystic, believed it to have been formed at the moment that Adam sinned in taking the apple – when melancholy ‘curdled in his blood’.6 Modern day Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, also positions melancholy, and its concern with loss and longing, at the very heart of the human condition, stating ‘melancholy (disappointment with all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) is in fact the beginning of philosophy.’7

The complexity of the idea of melancholy means that it has oscillated between attempts to define it scientifically, and its embodiment within a more poetic ideal. As a very coarse generalisation, the scientific/psychological underpinnings of melancholy dominated the early period, from the late centuries BC when ideas on medicine were being formulated, while in later, mainly post-medieval times, the literary ideal became more significant. In recent decades, the rise of psychiatry has re-emphasised the scientific dimensions of melancholy. It was never a case of either/or, however, and both ideals, along with a multitude of other colourings, have persisted through history.

The essential nature of melancholy as a bodily as well as a purely mental state is grounded in the foundation of ideas on physiology; that it somehow relates to the body itself. These ideas are rooted in the ancient notion of ‘humours’. In Greek and Roman times humoralism was the foundation for an understanding of physiology, with the four humours ruling the body’s characteristics.

Phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile were believed to be the four governing elements, and each was ascribed to particular seasons, elements and temperaments. This can be expressed via a tetrad, or four-cornered diagram.

The four-part divisions of temperament were echoed in a number of ways, as in the work of Alkindus, the ninth century Arab philosopher, who aligned the times of the day with particular dispositions. The tetrad could therefore be further embellished, with the first quarter of the day sanguine, second choleric, third melancholic and finally phlegmatic. Astrological allegiances reinforce the idea of four quadrants, so that Jupiter is sanguine, Mars choleric, Saturn is melancholy,and the moon or Venus is phlegmatic. The organs, too, are associated with the points of the humoric tetrad, with the liver sanguine, the gall bladder choleric, the spleen melancholic, and the brain/ lungs phlegmatic.

The Four Humours, adapted from Henry E Sigerist (1961) A History of Medicine, 2 vols New York: Oxford University Press, 2: 232.8

Melancholy, then, is associated with twilight, autumn, earth, the spleen, coldness and dryness, and the planet Saturn. All of these elements weave in and out of the history of melancholy, appearing in mythology, astrology, medicine, literature and art. The complementary humours and temperaments were sometimes hypothesised as balances, so that the opposite of one might be introduced as a remedy for an excess of another. For melancholy, the introduction of sanguine elements – blood, air and warmth – could counter the darkness. This could also work at an astrological level, as in the appearance of the magic square of Jupiter on the wall behind Albrecht Dürer’s iconic engraving Melencolia I, (1514) – the sign of Jupiter to introduce a sanguine balance to the saturnine melancholy angel.

In this early phase of the development of humoral thinking a key tension arose, as on one hand it was devised as a means of establishing degrees of wellness, but on the other it was a system of types of disposition. As Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl put it, there were two quite different meanings to the terms sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy, as either ‘pathological states or constitutional aptitudes’.9 Melancholy became far more connected with the idea of illness than the other temperaments, and was considered a ‘special problem’.

The blurry boundary between an illness and a mere temperament was a result of the fact that many of the symptoms of ‘melancholia’ were mental, and thus difficult to objectify, unlike something as apparent as a disfigurement or wound. The theory of the humours morphed into psychology and physiognomy, with particular traits or appearances associated with each temperament.

Melancholy was aligned with ‘the lisping, the bald, the stuttering and the hirsute’, and ‘emotional disturbances’ were considered as indicators of ‘mental melancholy’.10 Hippocrates in his Aphorismata, or ‘Aphorisms,’ in 400 BC noted, ‘Constant anxiety and depression are signs of melancholy.’ Two centuries later the physician Galen, in an uncharacteristically succinct summation, noted that Hippocrates was ‘right in summing up all melancholy symptoms in the two following: Fear and Depression.’11

The foundations of the ideas on melancholy are fraught with complexity and contradiction, and this signals the beginning of a legacy of richness and debate.We have a love-hate relationship with melancholy, recognising its potential, yet fearing its connotations. What is needed is some kind of guide book, to know how to recognise it, where to find it – akin to the Observer’s Guides, the Blue Guides, or Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Cloudspotter’s Guide.

Yet, to attempt to write a guide to such an amorphous concept as melancholy is overwhelmingly impossible, such is the breadth and depth of the topic, the disciplinary territories, the disputes, and the extensive creative outpourings. There is a tremendous sense of the infinite, like staring at stars, or at a room full of files, a daunting multitude. The approach is, therefore, to adopt the notion of the ‘constellation’, and to plot various points and coordinates, a join-the-dots approach to exploration which roams far and wide, and connects ideas and examples in a way which seeks new combinations and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions.

A Field Guide to Melancholyis therefore in itself a melancholic enterprise: for the writer, and the reader, the very idea of a ‘field guide’ to something so contradictory, so elusive, embodies the impossibility and futility that is central to melancholy’s yearning. Yet, it is this intangible, potent possibility which creates melancholy’s magnetism, recalling Joseph Campbell’s version of the Buddhist advice to:

Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world.12

Notes

1.Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea, vol. 3, p.159.

2. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, p.458, emphasis mine.

3. This constant shift in the development of concepts is well-illustrated by Umberto Eco (ed) (2004) History of Beauty. New York: Rizzoli, and his recent (2007) On Ugliness, New York: Rizzoli.

4. The term ‘constellation’ is Giorgio Agamben’s, and captures the sense of melancholy’s persistence as a collection of ideas, rather than one simple definition. See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm inWestern Culture, p.19.

5. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, p.258.

6. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy,Religion and Art, p.79.

7. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody sayTotalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion, p.148.

8. In StanleyW Jackson (1986), Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times, p.9.

9. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy,Religion andArt, p.12.

10. ibid, p.15.

11. ibid, p.15, and n.42.

12. A phrase used by Campbell in his lectures, for example on the DVD Joseph Campbell (1998) Sukhavati. Acacia.

The Conundrums of Melancholy:

Madness, Genius and Beauty

Laurence Aberhart, War memorial #2, Balclutha, 1980

1

The Conundrums of Melancholy:

Madness, Genius and Beauty

Bob: It’s a sad and beautiful world.

Zach: Yeah, it’s a sad and beautiful world, buddy.

Jim Jarmusch, Down By Law1

Suffering and joy. Pleasure and sadness. Melancholy is a conundrum, a riddle of contradictions. The latent richness of the concept grows out of these paradoxes, and three particular enigmas haunt melancholy: madness,genius and beauty. Why should being sad mean that you’re mad? Why are geniuses and heroes so often melancholy? And, how can things that are sorrowful be beautiful?

Melancholy and Madness: ‘A disorder of the intellect’

Madness hangs around melancholy from the beginnings of the idea two and a half millennia ago. The wavering boundary between what might be considered simply a mood, or a disposition, and a more serious disorder has never been resolved. Science’s dominion over melancholy as an illness has long sought to clarify the symptoms of insanity. But melancholy has always remained elusive, evading systems of rigid classification, and the situation becomes even more complicated in recent times with ‘depression’ added to the complex condition.

Early investigations of melancholy were based on humoral theory, and melancholy was simply one amongst four types of humoral imbalance, rather than any exceptional or alarming condition. Historians of medicine point to concerns, even amongst the ancients, about distinguishing mere temperaments from serious disorders. In the diagnosis of a ‘melancholic’, what was required was the identification of a disproportionate expression of sadness, for example in the magnitude or sustained nature of grief, or in wretchedness without a normal cause. This foundational judgment, rooted in the words of Hippocrates (‘If fear or sadness last for a long time it is melancholia’), persists to the present day, almost word for word, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

These early foundations of the idea hung together as melancholy travelled through time and space. In medieval times in the West it was in the cathedral schools and monasteries that the thinking on melancholia survived, just as many other concepts and aspects of knowledge did. In this religious setting the original ideas became cross-pollinated, and religious misdemeanours and medical explanations were elided in the explanations of melancholy and madness.

The understandings of melancholy that underpinned theWestern medical tradition were added to as further information came from the East via translations of the works of, particularly, Middle Eastern scholars like the ninth century Alkindus (Al Kindi) and tenth century Avicenna (Ibn’Sina). The humoral traditions of Galen were continued in this work. The emphasis was on the treatment of humoral imbalances, eliminating the black bile by bathing and other means, for example, and remedies such as coitus were suggested because they ‘dissipated fixed ideas of the soul and calmed ungovernable passions’.2

The Byzantine Paul of Aegina noted that ‘Melancholy is a disorder of the intellect without fever’,3 and he identified a range of symptomatic behaviours of those afflicted, including prophesying, suffering from delusions of being animals, and identifying as an earthen-vessel. This latter delusion is believed to derive from black bile’s alliance with ‘earth’, and occurs also in Arabic writings around this time, as a feeling of being made of clay, which again produces anxiety in the sufferer, and fear of being broken. Foretelling the future had earlier been considered one of the gifts of melancholy, associated with exceptional insight, as with the connection to genius in the following section. At this time though, prophesying was considered another sign of madness.

Later medieval times continued the legacies inherited from the ancients, including the root idea of ‘fear and sadness’ being out of proportion or without cause, but added to this was the idea of acedia – or what is sometimes termed ‘sloth’. Monks in particular were afflicted by acedia; it was an occupational hazard. Their necessary detachment from the ordinary world of daily activities in order to release them to a life of asceticism and dedication to prayer meant that monks sometimes descended into a state of torpor. This was not only seen as a type of melancholic sickness, but also a deadly sin, persisting today as the sin of Sloth. Acedia, and its companion tristitia, are outlined in chapter 3, where the Field Guide plots a number of the allied terms which enrich ideas on melancholy.

Another spectre of insanity associated with melancholy was witchcraft. Things that were unexplainable, like exceptional memory or prophesying, were beyond what might be considered normal, and placed in the category of insanity. For several centuries this fear and lack of comprehension was explained away as a particular type of madness – witchcraft. This ‘mad’ melancholy is what Frances Yates called ‘bad melancholy’, as opposed to the ‘good melancholy’ of geniuses and heroes. During Elizabethan times, melancholia, madness and witchcraft were closely linked. Satan rather than Saturn became the governing force for melancholy in the eyes of those who considered it a sign of possession by the devil, or a punishment for evil. At this time, the ‘mad’ version of melancholy was mainly associated with women, who were, in the words of sixteenth century Dutch doctor and ‘protopsychopathologist’ JanWeir: ‘raving, poor, simple, useless, ignorant, gullible, stupid, vile, uneducated, infatuated, toothless, silly, unsteady …old.’4

Fears of witchcraft were rife in the colonies, as in the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century. Cotton Mather, a Puritan New England minister involved in the trials, sought both religious and pathological explanations for melancholy. Influenced by medical texts and the legacy of humoralism, Mather hedged his bets, and explained melancholy as being related to ‘.atulencies in the region of the Hypochondria as well as a degree of diabolical possession’.5 The reported manifestations of melancholy madness echo those from the Middle Ages, as in the delusions of being ‘metamorphosized into a china jar’ or ‘transformed into a smoking pidgeon pie’.6

One of the key texts in the history of the complexities of melancholy was Robert Burton’s massive tome, published in 1621, which bears the title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically,Historically,Opened and Cut up.7 Burton, an Oxford don writing under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, set out to describe all the forms of melancholy, including head melancholy, hypochondriacal melancholy, religious melancholy, love melancholy, and ‘Maids, Nuns, and Widows’ Melancholy’. This form of definition by description, running to some 783 pages in the first edition, rather than achieving any kind of precision served to further emphasise the complexity of melancholy. The pseudonym of Democritus Junior linked Burton back to the age of Hippocrates, and allowed him a detached perspective from which to construct his work. He told a tale where Hippocrates came across Democritus in his garden at Abdera, sitting with a book on his lap, and ‘the subject of his book was melancholy and madness: and around him lay the carkasses of several beasts, newly cut up by him and anatomized; not that he did condemn Gods creatures, as he told Hippocrates, but to find out the seat of this altra bilis, or melancholy, whence it proceeds, and how it is engendred into mens bodies, to the intent that he might better cure it in himself, by his writings and observations teach others how to prevent and avoid it.’8 There are echoes of this ‘anatomising’ of animals with the ‘anatomy’ that Burton constructs as his study of melancholy, the idea of trying to find the cause, and the cure. It is speculated that Burton’s adoption of a pseudonym allowed him to present his own melancholy, that he was part and parcel of what was considered ‘so universal a malady’ and an ‘epidemical disease’ – words that carry a curious resonance amid today’s concern over the pervasiveness of depression.

Samuel Johnson’s definition of melancholy in his eighteenth-century Dictionary listed ‘madness’ amongst its senses. For Johnson, melancholy had no positive dimensions, no aspect of genius, and was a sign of insanity. In addition to his Dictionary, Johnson also compiled an extensive set of Sermons, where he provided a more thorough account of the madness of melancholy, particularly its effects. He believed melancholy to be the cause of fixating on one ‘notion or inclination’ so that it ‘takes such an entire possession of a man’s mind, and so engrosses his faculties, as to mingle thoughts perhaps he is not himself conscious of with almost all his conceptions, and influence his whole behavior.’9

While Samuel Johnson listed ‘madness’ amongst the definitions of melancholy, the nineteenth-century encyclopaedia of Good, Gregory and Bosworth, Pantologia, split the definition into two terms, adding a separate entry for melancholia. They retained Johnson’s definition of melancholy in the senses of a literary, Shakespearean ‘madness’ or ‘temper’, but the ‘disease’ component was ascribed to melancholia. This, they defined as:

Melancholy madness. A disease in the class neuroses … characterized by erroneous judgment … from imaginary perceptions or recollections influencing the conduct, and depressing the mind with ill-grounded fears; not combined with either pyrexia [fever] or comatose affections; often appearing without dyspepsia, yet attended with costiveness [constipation], chiefly in persons of rigid fibres and torpid insensibility.10

Sigmund Freud established a further landmark in the map of melancholy and madness in 1917, with his essay Mourning and Melancholia. The difference between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ grief is again the foundation for the distinctions he makes, with melancholia identified as a pathological condition, the state where mourning fails to reach completion. The individual, or ego, embeds their sense of loss within themselves, refusing to allow the loss to pass. Freud described how the ‘[t]he shadow of the object fell upon the ego’ and ‘the loss of the object had been transformed into the loss of ego’, so that the loss of the object, whether it be a person or an idea, becomes the same as the loss of the self, the ego.11 The melancholic remains attached to this loss, and does not seek a cure.

The rise of psychiatry and psychoanalysis had a major influence on the codification of melancholia, yet the definitions and distinctions remain stubbornly imprecise. In an effort to achieve clinical precision the signs of melancholy were transliterated into medical-speak, so that lethargy and listlessness, for example, became ‘psychomotor retardation’.12 Depression and bi-polarity became implicated within the discourse on melancholy, and the desire to objectify, and consequently ‘treat’, these conditions is symptomatic of the overall medicalisation of mental wellbeing. Yet, despite its inclusion in the authoritative DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, the psychiatrist’s ‘bible’ – debate still continues within psychiatry over the definition of melancholia.

The definition, and thus the diagnosis, of melancholia in the DSM is problematic, not least because it seeks to objectify something which is strongly coloured by subjectivity. The dilemma is the same as that embedded in the very origins of definitions of melancholia: who is to judge when sadness is disproportionate? Added to this are the flaws in definition that led to such situations as American and British psychiatrists using identical versions of the DSM, with exactly the same group of patients, making completely different diagnoses.

Psychiatry persists in attempts to codify melancholia, and recent debate includes such assertions as: ‘melancholia, rather than being a dimensionally severe condition, is quintessentially a categorical condition awaiting prototypic definition as a category’,13 and this is necessary to avoid ‘overdiagnosis’ of melancholia. In other words, the ongoing lack of a clear definition allows for imprecision within the realm of the science of psychiatry, which like any science aspires to precision. As part of this debate, psychiatrists Fink and Taylor attempted a definition of melancholia via a list – an approach reminiscent of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy – which relied largely on definition through enumeration. In the category of ‘melancholia’ they listed ‘Psychotic depression, Manic-depression, Puerperal depression, Abnormal bereavement, Depression with stupor or catatonia’, and in ‘Non-melancholic mood disorders’ they placed ‘Characterological depression, Reactive depressive disorders, Premenstrual dysphoria.’14 It seems that science is far from reducing melancholia to a set of quantifiable, objective features, and its elusive quality sees it slipping out of any container into which it is placed.

However, psychiatric concerns cast the Field Guide’s advocacy of melancholy as a rich dimension of human existence into tricky territory, with global worries over the increase in mental illness – of an escalation of melancholy seen as madness. Writers such as Peter D Kramer are emphatic that depression as a medical illness should be eradicated, just as diseases like smallpox have been. Kramer, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and Against Depression, believes that there is a need to re-evaluate the whole tradition of ‘heroic melancholy’ which he sees as standing in the way of true depression, through providing excuses or validations for this condition. Yet, while Kramer writes melancholy off as a type of ‘myth’ it is also important to remain critical of science, which operates within its own mythology and ‘truths’.

On the other hand, in The Loss of Sadness, a critique of the massive increase in depression, Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield claim that it is a redefinition of depression rather than any shift in the populace’s mental health, which explains the contemporary situation. Put simply, it is ‘diagnostic inflation’ based on a flawed definition.15 Which is to say, ‘the recent explosion of putative depressive disorder, in fact, does not stem primarily from a real rise in this condition. Instead it is a product of conflating the two conceptually distinct categories of normal sadness and depressive disorder and thus classifying the many instances of normal sadness as mental disorders.’16

Horwitz and Wakefield criticise the DSM for failing to align diagnoses of mental illness with ‘context,’ and thus ‘normal’ responses to stressors – things which might trigger mental illness – were being diagnosed as illness. While this might assist the psychiatrists in their categorisation, it threatens the central conundrum of melancholy: one of the key elements of its constellation is sadness-without cause. Or in psychiatric-speak, depression-without stressor.

Both Kramer’s and Horwitz and Wakefield’s work serve to further complicate the legacy of melancholy and madness. Psychiatry’s efforts to draw a line between normal and abnormal sadness, and a wish to eradicate the latter, bring the worrying scenario that the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. Melancholia has always been the paradox of ‘the normally abnormal’ and to normalise everything to some euphoric equilibrium threatens to eliminate the shadows within the human condition.

And, melancholia isn’t universally homogenous. Although there is agreement that sadness is generic, melancholy is culturally inflected, and has been since its origins. The legacy of melancholia appears in both Western and Eastern writings, and while there are substantial agreements and complementarities, it is hardly a universal ill – like smallpox. There are arguments that ‘melancholia’ as ‘clinical depression’ is a construction of theWestfishushrut Jadhav asks, ‘Is the indigenous Indian version of depression the same as western depression?’ and provides the response: ‘we do not know’.17 The context differs across cultures, and melancholy might therefore vary in ways as subtle as an accent, or as profound as an entirely different lexicon, as explored in Chapter 4. And there is a politics of melancholia – a belief that each culture should have ownership of their interpretations and beliefs, as opposed to a globalised ethnopsychiatry.

A Field Guide to Melancholydoes not romanticise depression, and is rather part of a salvage operation, reclaiming melancholy’s bitter-sweetness. The reality and painfulness of major depression is undeniable, and many readers will be familiar with the plight of sufferers of depression and the need for treatment. The conflation of melancholy and depression, and the undefinitive definitions of melancholy as madness, reveal that there are still many shades of grey. While science pushes towards wanting to find clear-cut conditions, striving to determine that melancholy is binary rather than analogue (either you are or you aren’t melancholy) the complexity of melancholy’s mélange resists such cleaving. There are associated questions of morals and ethics which further complicate things, including whether treatments should be pharmaceutical or psychoanalytical, whether psychiatry is universally applicable, and so on, and this book will not seek to extend these particular arguments. Whether due to diagnostic inflation or a demonstrable psychopathological change in the population, the concern is that the creative capacity of melancholy will be suppressed because of the fear of madness, and along with the elimination of ‘bad melancholy’ comes the loss of the ‘good melancholy’ of genius and beauty.

Melancholy and Genius: ‘A disease of heroes’

The connection between melancholy and the intellect is a circular one. Throughout melancholy’s history the conundrum has been detected at various points on this circle – in some cases melancholy is seen as a cause of genius, and in others as a consequence of it. Irrespective of which is the cause and which the effect, the introspection of melancholy in the context of ‘genius’ is associated with unusual insight, in sharp distinction from that particular thread of the discourse which connects melancholy self-absorption with sloth, or acedia. The very same things which might be considered signs of madness, then, can also be interpreted as genius.

This paradox of melancholy and genius was first captured in Aristotle’s ‘Problem XXX, I’,18 which begins with the perplexing question, ‘Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to the extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?’19

The ‘problem’ is outlined in a lengthy discussion on the varying manifestations of melancholy, including the ‘air’ produced by flatulence and sexual arousal, and concludes that ‘all melancholy persons are out of the ordinary, not owing to illness, but from their natural constitution’ – or as Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl put it: ‘normally abnormal’.20

The necessary balance needed to ensure a melancholic is not a freak but a genius is speculated to come from the correct amount of melancholy humour – black bile – and that it must be of an average temperature, not too hot, nor too cold. The melancholic genius navigates a path between the two great abysses of depression and recklessness. If the black bile is too cold the resulting melancholia is one of dullness, and too hot brings about melancholic mania – in between is the melancholic mean, the condition of genius.

Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, from the middle of the second century AD, is one of the early, classic texts to document the association of melancholy and genius, or in Gellius’s case, heroism. The 1795 edition of Attic Nights describes how ‘the waywardness of disposition which is called melancholy’ is something which does ‘not happen to little and weak minds; but there is something of elevated affection in it.’21 It also aligns melancholy with the idea of ‘frenzy’ and still further with the ‘highest spiritual exaltation’.

Throughout history, oscillations have continued between madness, melancholy and intellect, with waves of interest such as the medieval scholar Albertus Magnus’s work on Aristotle’s ‘Problem XXX, I’ which re-awakened interest in the connections, re-stating the melancholic’s outstanding qualities as good memory and astuteness. The two poles of this conundrum are positioned around the heavy gravitas of the saturnine temperament, and the contrasting ‘spiritus phantasticus