Theoretical Concepts for American Studies
Week 6: Melancholia
Natalia Cecire | n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk
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- What is psychoanalysis?
- Some psychoanalytic concepts: ego, unconscious (system Ucs.), cathexis, libido
- "Mourning and Melancholia"
- Applications: Ahmed and Berry
1. What is psychoanalysis?
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
1881: doctorate in medicine
1886–1938: wrote and practiced in Vienna
1938: evacuated to London to escape the Nazi regime
Psychoanalysis: a theory of the human mind and a therapeutic practice based on that theory, centered primarily on dialogue between the patient (analysand) and the analyst.
concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis: narcissism, projection, phallic symbolism
Sources: Paul Krugman, The New York Times; Jamelle Bouie, Slate; Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone.
liberal subject:
• a coherent individual
• self-possessed and self-knowing
• is therefore always capable of acting in rational self-interest
• this model of the self is associated with Enlightenment philosophy
• it's the model of the self that modern democracies assume
• struggles for legal rights (e.g. citizenship, the vote) within western democracies often depend on representing dominated peoples as liberal subjects
An iceberg is often used as a metaphor for Freud's theory of the mind. The bigger part—the unconscious—is the part you can't see.
What psychoanalysis is good at:
- understanding the individual in relation to the collective
- describing time in nonlinear ways (why memories come back and haunt us, why our minds don't just move forward)
- taking seriously “weird stuff” that would otherwise be dismissed as inexplicable (the “crazy,” the childish, the “primitive,” the “superstitious”), and explaining it
As soon as we see weird stuff happening ("WTF"), we start to reach for psychoanalysis ("phallic").
Source: Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone.
2. Some useful psychoanalytic concepts
An iceberg is often used as a metaphor for Freud's theory of the mind. The bigger part—the unconscious—is the part you can't see.
"subconscious"
In psychoanalysis, the "subconscious" is not a thing.
repression: the involuntary process by which the ego pushes problematic experiences, feelings, and desires into the unconscious
Libido is "economic" in psychoanalysis because its quantities matter; like in the law of conservation of energy in physics, psychic energy in psychoanalysis can't be created or destroyed; it has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.
cathexis: an investment of psychic energy in a person or object; i.e., an attachment
3. “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917)
All illnesses are historically specific. Naming an illness implies a theory of how the body and/or mind works.
"Melancholia": literally, an excess of black bile.
In ancient Greek medicine, health depends on a balance of four "humours" or elements: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
Image from Leonhard von Thurneisser, Quinta essentia, 1574
Reality-testing [i.e. encounters with the outside world] has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be witdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. [...] Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. [...W]hen the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again. (244–45; emphasis added)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
[M]elancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness [i.e. unconscious], in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. (245)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
The essential thing, therefore, is not whether the melancholic's distressing self-denigration is correct, in the sense that his self-criticism agrees with the opinion of other people. The point must rather be that he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation. (247)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different, for whose coming-about various conditions seem to be necessary. (248–49)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different, for whose coming-about various conditions seem to be necessary. (248–49)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (240; emphasis added)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
The narcissistic [i.e. self-directed] identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up. (249)
[B]y taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction. (257)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
If the love for the object—a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up—takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object [i.e. the part of the ego that has become identified with the love-object], abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. (251)
Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
3. Applications
feminist killjoys, unhappy queers, melancholic migrants
Two steps to this argument:
1. Mainstream culture represents migrant responses to racism as melancholic.
2. Representing migrant responses to racism as melancholic allows mainstream culture to suggest that migrants are not so much being harmed by racism as really harming themselves. (And that's super messed up!)
The civilizing mission [of empire] can be redescribed as a happiness mission. For happiness to become a mission, the colonized other must first be deemed unhappy. [...] Colonial rule is justified as a duty to make others live according to the happiness end. History of British India [by James Mill, 1817] is a highly strategic deployment of history: demonstrating the unhappiness of un-British India was a way of defending the happiness of the colonial end. (125)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
liberal subject:
• a coherent individual
• self-possessed and self-knowing
• is therefore always capable of acting in rational self-interest
• this model of the self is associated with Enlightenment philosophy
• it's the model of the self that modern democracies assume
• struggles for legal rights (e.g. citizenship, the vote) within western democracies often depend on representing dominated peoples as liberal subjects
Colonialism is justified as necessary not only to increase human happiness but to teach the natives how to be happy. They must learn “good habits” by unlearning what is custom or customary. The general end of happiness translates into the particular end of the individual: the creation of “individuals” becomes the purpose of colonial education or training. (128)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
Colonial education in teaching the natives "good habits" creates a new "class of persons" described famously by Thomas Babington Macaulay in his "Minute on Indian Education" as "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Becoming an individual thus means becoming English.
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
[C]ontemporary race politics in the UK involves not only a direct inheritance of this history but a social obligation to remember this history of empire as a history of happiness. [...] To become British is to accept empire as the gift of happiness, which might involve an implicit injunction to forget or not to remember the violence of colonial rule. (130–131)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
If anything, the migrant culture appears as culture, as something given or possessed, through being contrasted with the individualism of the West, where you are free to do and to be "whoever" you want to be, understood as the freedom to be happy. (134)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
I want to consider melancholia as a way of reading or diagnosing other as having ‘lost something’ and as failing to let go of what has been lost. To read others as melancholic would be to read their attachments as death-wishes, as attachments to things already dead. (141)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
[Jess’s father’s] second speech suggests that the refusal to play a national game is the “truth” behind the migrant’s suffering: you suffer because you do not play the game, where not playing is read as self-exclusion. For Jess to be happy, her father lets her be included, narrated as a form of letting go. By implication, not only is he letting her go; he is also letting go of his own suffering, the unhappiness caused by accepting racism, as the “point” of his exclusion. I suggest that the father is represented in the first speech as melancholic: as refusing to let go of his suffering, as incorporating the very object of [his] own loss. His refusal to let Jess go [to the football match] is readable as a symptom of melancholia: as a stubborn attachment to his own injury. (142)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
The narrative implicit in the resolution of the father’s trauma is not that migrants "invented racism" to explain their loss but that they preserve its power to govern social life by not getting over it. The moral task is thus ‘to get over it,’ as if when you are over it, it is gone. (143)
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 2010
Two steps to this argument:
1. Mainstream culture represents migrant responses to racism as melancholic.
2. Representing migrant responses to racism as melancholic allows mainstream culture to suggest that migrants are not so much being harmed by racism as really harming themselves. (And that's super messed up!)
With respect to one of these perennial questions, however, there has always been a high degree of consensus. What is to become of the Indian? The answer: He will disappear. (52)
Brewton Berry, "The Myth of the Vanishing Indian," 1960.
Edward Curtis, "Vanishing Race: Navaho," 1904. Library of Congress.
Zane Grey, The Vanishing American (novel), 1925.
In 1835, under the Andrew Jackson (left) administration, the six-year Second Seminole War began, leading to the remaining Native Americans in Florida (various tribes under the umbrella name "Seminole") being moved to a reservation. Osceola (right) was one of the primary Seminole leaders.
Three boys from the Carlisle Indian School (PA), 1883 and 1886. Changes in dress and hairstyle are used to stand as evidence of changes in culture.
Some races of man seem molded in wax, soft and melting, at once plastic and feeble. But the Indian is hewn out of rock.... Races of inferior energy have possessed a power of expansion and assimilation to which he is a stranger, and it is this fixed and rigid quality which has proved his ruin. He will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together. (53)
Francis Parkman, qtd. in Brewton Berry, "The Myth of the Vanishing Indian," 1960.
Why might Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson who ostensibly care about Native Americans be so invested in treating Native Americans like a lost love-object?
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Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012.