Theoretical Concepts for American Studies

Week 5: Melancholia

Natalia Cecire | n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk

You can find these slides at natalia.cecire.org/presentations.
The slides are embedded in the browser, so if you navigate to them now on your phone or laptop, you can follow along.

1. What is psychoanalysis?
2. Some psychoanalytic concepts: ego, unconscious (system Ucs.), cathexis, libido
3. "Mourning and Melancholia"
4. Application: Crimp

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. Application

Melancholia involves sadness, but not all sadness is melancholia.

The SILENCE = DEATH poster was introduced in 1987 and was adopted by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). The pink triangle was used to mark persecuted homosexuals in Nazi Germany, and was reclaimed by gay activists in the 1970s.

I look at faces at countless memorial services and cannot comprehend why the connection isn't made between these deaths and going out to fight so that more of these deaths, including possibly one's own, can be staved off. Huge numbers regularly show up in cities for Candlelight Marches, all duly recorded for the television cameras. Where are these same numbers when it comes to joining political organizations...or plugging in to the incipient civil disobedience movement represented in ACT UP?

Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, 1989, quoted in Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," 1989

We [the US] are a nation at ease with grievance but not with grief. It is reassuring ... to believe in the efficacy of grievance in redressing grief. Yet if grievance is understood to be the social and legal articulation of grief, then it has also been incapable of addressing those aspects of grief that speak in a different language—a language that may seem inchoate [not fully formed] because it is not fully reconcilable to the vocabulary of social formation or ideology but that nonetheless cuts a formative pattern.

Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, 2000.

For many of us, mourning becomes militancy.

Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," 1989

Reality passes its verdict—that the object no longer exists—upon each single one of the memories and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object, and the ego, confronted as it were with the decision whether it will share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in being alive to sever its attachment to the nonexistent object. (qtd. in Crimp 9)

[In our translation, p. 255: Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted as it were with the question whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished.]

Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917

No matter how extreme the self-hatred, I am loath for obvious reasons to accuse gay men of any pathological condition. (14)

Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," 1989

Clearly, we can take this book [After the Ball by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen] seriously only as a symptom of malaise—in its excoriation of gay culture, it bears every distinguishing characteristic of melancholia Freud specifies. Moreover, its accusations are also self-accusations: “We, the authors, are every bit as guilty of a lot of the nastiness we describe as are other gays”.... The authors’ indictments of gay men are utterly predictable: we lie, deny reality, have no moral standards; we are narcissistic, self-indulgent, self-destructive, unable to love or even form lasting friendships; we flaunt it in public, abuse alcohol and drugs; and our community leaders and intellectuals are fascists. (13)

Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," 1989

2020 US presidential candidate and Afghanistan veteran Pete Buttigieg with his husband Chasten Glezman. The great LGBTQ activist victories of the last 30 years are widely considered to be inclusion into the institutions of marriage and the military. (This inclusion is not total: most trans personnel were banned from the US military in April 2019.)

This presentation was made using reveal.js 3.5.0, created by Hakim El Hattab / @hakimel.